Someone Like You
Cathy Kelly

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2000

Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007273928

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780007389360

Version: 2017-10-28

Praise

Praise for Cathy Kelly:

‘A tear-pricking writer, capable of making you care about her characters.’

Daily Mail

‘Totally believable.’

Rosamunde Pilcher

‘An upbeat and diverting tale skilfully told…Kelly knows what her readers want and consistently delivers.’

Sunday Independent

‘Warm and delightful.’

New Woman

‘An absorbing, heart-warming tale.’

Company

‘Her skill at dealing with the complexities of modern life, marriage and families is put to good effect as she teases out the secrets of her characters.’

Choice

‘Kelly dramatises her story with plenty of sparky humour.’

The Times

‘Kelly has an admirable capacity to make the readers identify, in turn, with each of her female characters…’

Irish Independent

To John, with all my love

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Excerpt from The House on Willow Street

Prologue

Chapter One

Back Ads

About the Author

By the Same Author:

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Hannah stretched one slim, tanned leg in the direction of the taps, clasped the hot tap expertly with her dripping foot and felt hot water flood deliciously into the bath.

‘You’ve done that before,’ said Jeff in amusement as she sank back against him in the water, her back slick against his bare chest, nothing but lemon verbena-scented bubbles between them.

‘I love reading in the bath and, in the winter, it’s horrible sitting up out of the water to turn on the taps, so I’ve learned how to do it with my feet,’ Hannah murmured as the water level rose slowly in the cracked old roll-top bath and the heat flooded all over her limbs. She felt gloriously tired yet happy, every inch of her body satiated even though she’d had practically no sleep last night. Sharing a bath after such a wonderful, marathon lovemaking session had been a brilliant idea. The bath water eased the aches caused by Jeff’s very energetic lovemaking. There had been one mad moment when they’d almost fallen off Hannah’s bed and she’d just managed not to shriek out loud in agony as a shooting pain had rocketed up her back into her neck. That was obviously the drawback of flings with younger men, she decided gleefully: they had no concept of back problems and were keen to do gymnastic things with mirrors, armchairs and the ties of your dressing gown. The only thing poor Harry had ever done with the ties of his dressing gown was to let them trail behind him all over the kitchen floor picking up bits of fluff, spare cornflakes and dust.

What was she calling him ‘poor Harry’ for anyway? ‘Poor’ my eye. Parasitical, Lying Bastard Harry suited him better. Thinking of parasites, she grimly hoped that his year-long trek around South America meant he’d finally met that infamous parasite that lived in tropical rivers and swam up the urine stream of any man stupid enough to pee in a river. Once it swam into your system, you were in big trouble. Hannah hoped eradicating it would involve some agonizing operation where Harry couldn’t sit down without wincing for a week. Something like the duck-billed speculum thingy which women had to endure being inserted for cervical smear tests, but much, much worse.

‘Is there anything else you can do with your feet?’ Jeff asked wickedly, whisking her away from the Amazon and agonizing medical experiments by nibbling her ear provocatively.

‘No,’ Hannah said firmly, concentrating on letting the water soothe the nagging ache in her right hip. She closed her eyes and began planning the next hour: her small suitcase was neatly stowed on top of the wardrobe in the boxroom and the clothes she wanted to take to Egypt were carefully arranged on the boxroom bed. It would take half an hour to pack, ticking off every item of clothing and every toiletry on her pared-down list. Then she had to empty the fridge. No point coming back to a disgustingly smelly kitchen through carelessness. When the kitchen was linked to the sitting room by badly fitting double doors, limiting bad smells was particularly important. Logistically, Hannah thought as her mind ran through her preparations with the precision of a Swiss watch, she only had a couple of minutes more to soak in the bath.

Jeff had other ideas. His mouth began trailing down her neck on to her shoulders while his hands rippled under the water, stroking Hannah’s thighs suggestively. She could feel the muscular chest with its six-pack stomach contracting with desire as he touched her.

She sat up abruptly and turned off the hot tap, her dark hair slicking against her skin like a tangle of seaweed.

‘We don’t have time, Jeff,’ she said sternly. ‘It’s half nine already. I’ve got to be at the airport in a couple of hours and I’ve got some phone calls to make, not to mention the fact that I haven’t packed yet.’

Jeff pulled her effortlessly back into the bath with arms used to bench-pressing double her body weight. ‘If I was going with you, you wouldn’t need to pack very much,’ he said, nuzzling her ear. ‘Just a couple of G-string bikinis and a sexy dress like that one you were wearing last night.’

Hannah had to smile. The amethyst dress was incredibly daring and unlike anything else in her limited and quite conservative wardrobe: two flimsy spaghetti-strap little slip things worn together, she’d bought it in a designer shop in a sale and it had hung in her wardrobe for a year before she’d felt brave enough to put it on. But last night, for the launch of the hotel’s new nightclub, Jupiter, she’d decided to drag it out and wear it.

‘There are going to be loads of famous people there. The guest list is like flicking through Hello!’ one of Hannah’s hotel receptionist colleagues had wittered excitedly about the launch weeks beforehand. ‘We’ve got to pull out all the stops, girls. We can’t let the hotel down.’

So Hannah had pulled out all the stops, had set her long dark hair in curlers so it rippled down her back like a sheet of raw silk and had shoe-horned herself into the ruinously expensive dress she’d nearly taken back to the shop so many times on the grounds that it was a waste of money. All the other Triumph Hotel receptionists had gasped in shock at the sight of the normally staid Ms Campbell in something other than her off-duty uniform of crisp white shirt, ironed blue jeans, blazer and loafers. She looked phenomenally sexy, they said, stunned. Who’d have thought she could transform herself from a frostily polite receptionist into a siren with just a dress?

Jeff Williams, who ran the hotel’s new gym and was as yet unfamiliar with Hannah’s reputation as a bit of an ice maiden, had gasped with pleasure at the sight of her gym-toned, curvaceous body clad in a wisp of filmy chiffon that clung in all the right places.

Unlike the starstruck members of staff who spent the night gazing cow-eyed at the various stars knocking back Moët in the roped-off area of the nightclub, Jeff and Hannah spent the evening discovering that they both loved to dance. They drank far more mineral water than alcohol as they moved sinuously on the dance floor, jiving, boogieing, salsaing and even waltzing when the DJ played some slow, jazzy numbers. High on having fun, it only took two glasses of white wine to give Hannah a heady buzz where the idea of letting Jeff kiss her seemed natural really, rather than a complete mistake.

‘I’m ten years older than you,’ she reproved as they squashed up together on one seat, his muscular arms wrapped around her and his fair head bent over hers. She felt ridiculously like a teenager on a date, but it was fun.

‘Thirty-six is hardly old,’ Jeff had murmured, kissing the tendrils of dark hair that clung to her cheekbones.

As his bachelor pad was miles across town and sounded like a laddish bombsite shared with three other young men, it seemed more sensible to have that cup of coffee in Hannah’s immaculate apartment, a mere stone’s throw from the Triumph Hotel.

Sitting on the small, hard sofa-bed, Jeff had admired the unusual brocade cushions that Hannah had hand-stamped with gold fabric paint one weekend, and then attempted a little handiwork of his own, stroking fingers up and down Hannah’s arm in a very erotic manner. He hadn’t pounced on her. She’d known he wouldn’t: used to having women swoon at his gym instructor physique, Jeff didn’t have to bother at all to attract gorgeous women, so he always made a point of making sure they knew what they were doing when things got intimate.

‘Are you sure you want to?’ he asked, his eager and ardent eyes proof that he certainly wanted to.

Hannah, who’d already decided she deserved a celebratory bonk after twelve months of celibacy, had said yes. It had been wonderful, rather like picking up the old tennis racquet you hadn’t used since you’d fallen in love with Wimbledon and Ivan Lendl sixteen years ago, and realizing that you could still lob the ball over the net without making a complete fool of yourself.

Jeff wasn’t to know that the last time she’d had that much exercise, she’d been in the middle of a class of fellow step-aerobics fans, all sweating like pigs with their T-shirts glued to their backs, their thighs aching and a supermodel-lookalike screaming at them to ‘move your arms, girls!’

Neither was she about to tell him that he was the first person other than herself to sleep in the queen-sized bed with the yellow brocade headboard Hannah had re-covered because she hated the original peach Dralon fabric. Men, particularly young men, she always felt, were nervous of the concept of both celibacy and women who made a conscious decision to have sex, instead of just getting carried away by too much vodka and a nice line in flattery. Conscious decisions implied another big C – commitment.

She figured that if Jeff discovered he was the one she’d chosen to break her enforced year of celibacy, he’d probably have run out of the apartment like the clappers, imagining he’d got himself involved with a neurotic bunny boiler. If only he knew.

Life had taught Hannah that men were useful for only one thing, and it wasn’t earning money, either. She’d learned her lessons early on, from her feckless father. When you were born in the wilds of Connemara where only the hardiest of livestock could survive, farmers like her father either toiled away until their fingers were gnarled with arthritis and they were old before their time, or they turned to the bottle and let their wives shoulder the burden of feeding the kids and paying the electricity bill. Hannah’s father had chosen the second path.

Her mother was the one who’d grown old before her time, her strong-boned face a mask of lines and misery by the time she was forty. Watching Anna Campbell come home white with exhaustion from cleaning out the kitchens in the local hotel and then sit down to knit another piece of the Aran sweater she was being paid buttons to finish, made Hannah vow never to end up in the same position. No man would ever enslave her in unholy matrimony or come home roaring drunk, screaming for a dinner he hadn’t contributed a penny to. No way.

She’d earn her fortune and be utterly independent, a career warrior who’d never have to strain her eyes knitting by the lights of a feeble lamp for the extra few pounds to kit her children out in reasonable clothes for Sunday Mass.

Failing her final school exams and the arrival of Harry had been the fatal glitches in this foolproof plan. But, thought Hannah, grinding her teeth even though the dentist had warned her to stop doing it, she was back on track now. Sort of. A new job, a cultural holiday to give her some of the education she knew she lacked, and a new life. Jeff, lovely though he was, wasn’t part of the new life. He’d get in the way and make her think about love and things. She’d had enough of love to last her a lifetime, thank you very much.

The water was getting uncomfortably cold and she was going to be late if she didn’t move soon. Hannah stood up gracefully and climbed out of the bath.

‘You’re in great shape,’ Jeff said, admiring her toned arms and small waist.

‘You mean for someone of my age,’ she teased, wrapping a towel around her body and rubbing her jawbone where she felt the most pain from her constant teeth grinding.

‘For anybody,’ he emphasized. ‘You must work out a lot. I see so many women who let themselves get out of shape. They think if they’re not an athletic build, why bother. But you really work at it.’

Hannah paused in towelling her hair dry and thought of the hours she’d spent on the StairMaster in the past year, jaw clenched as she pounded Harry out of her mind. Getting him out of her life had been difficult enough: eradicating him from her thoughts was another thing entirely.

Before Harry (or BH as she liked to think of it) she’d been in reasonable shape for a twenty-seven-year-old who smoked like a chimney. Of medium height and with a genetic tendency to put on weight, she was still young enough not to bother much with exercise, preferring the Marlboro Light Exercise Plan of lighting up whenever she felt hungry.

But during the Harry years, she’d spent far too long cuddling up next to him on their old sofa, sharing mammoth takeaways and entire boxes of chocolates as they watched videos. Life was one long Little House on the Prairie fantasy of delicious meals and lazy evenings toasting their toes in front of the fire while Harry discussed the novel he was going to write and Hannah stopped caring about leaving her dead-end job in the dress shop to pursue her dream of being rich and utterly independent. She stopped caring about her figure and was even persuaded to give up smoking when Harry went off the fags for an article he was writing about nicotine tablets. No cigarettes meant more chocolates and cups of tea with three sugars to make up for the pain of wanting a fag. Harry didn’t put on a pound: Hannah put on another twelve.

In cohabiting bliss, her ambition had disappeared along with her waistline. Until that awful August day she’d thrown him out and had started reclaiming her life – and her figure.

‘I go to the gym and to three aerobics classes, one toning class, and I walk about ten miles a week,’ she told Jeff.

‘You can tell,’ he said solemnly. ‘You gotta put the work in to get the body you want.’

Hannah nodded sagely. It was a pity she was leaving the hotel. It would have been fun to work out with Jeff, even if their fling probably wouldn’t have lasted very long.

Men like Jeff were always looking over your shoulder to see who was coming along behind you. One pretty, pouting twenty-something in a thong leotard asking him to explain the lateral pull-down machine and it’d have been all over.

Mind you, if she’d been staying on at the hotel, she wouldn’t have gone off with Jeff in the first place. The Triumph Hotel’s gossip network was far superior to the actual hotel network. It took over half an hour to have an omelette delivered to a guest’s bedroom via room service and only ten minutes for a juicy bit of news to travel all the way from the kitchens to the concierge desk, having reached the business centre and the restaurant into the bargain. The gossiping that would have gone on if Hannah had been seen walking out with the gym’s new manager would have been hilarious to behold.

After a year when she had gossiped with nobody, dated nobody and revealed not one item of information about herself to the naturally inquisitive staff, Hannah couldn’t have coped with seeing the floodgates of curiosity come rushing open. But she had her reference, her new job was lined up for when she returned from holiday and nobody could touch her for one carefree fling. ‘Indulge yourself,’ advised all the women’s magazines when it came to getting over unhappy love affairs. ‘Have a massage, treat yourself to an aromatherapy session.’ Jeff was her first AH (After Harry) treat. More fun than aromatherapy and less painful than a facial, but guaranteed to give you an inner glow that Oil of Olay couldn’t manage.

Happily unaware of his status as a reward for a year of celibacy, Jeff let more hot water flood into the bath and lay back in the bubbles. Trying not to let herself get irritated because he obviously had no intention of leaving, Hannah concentrated on rubbing moisturizer into her face.

She had been able to reshape her body with endless hours of exercising but her face remained stubbornly the same as ever: rounded with a pointed chin, slightly too-beaky nose and bright almond-shaped eyes the exact colour of toffee. With a sprinkling of amber freckles scattered across her nose and cheekbones, the cumulative effect of sparkling eyes and the rippling nutbrown hair should have been that of a casually pretty woman. Attractive but no beauty, would be the conclusion if someone had described Hannah to a stranger.

But a simple description would leave out the very thing which transformed her. Hannah glowed with that fleeting, most unbottleable quality that people lacking it did everything to acquire – sex appeal. From the way she walked with that languid sway of her enduringly curvy hips, to the way she drank her tea, wide mouth pursing up softly around the china to take a first sip, screamed of sexuality. She didn’t do it on purpose: in fact, she didn’t have to do anything. Hannah Campbell, thirty-six-year-old hotel receptionist and spinster of this parish, had been born like that. And it drove her insane.

When her long shaggy hair was tamed into the gleaming knot she wore for work and her small tortoiseshell glasses sat on her nose, Hannah could look as stern as the headmistress of a school for delinquents. Which was why she’d never bothered to get contact lenses. Nowadays she wanted to be able to hide her natural sexuality, to conceal it with sedate clothes, fierce glances and Reverend Mother spectacles.

Sex appeal was all very well in its place but all it had ever given Hannah was Trouble, with a capital T. Being naturally sexy in her rural home town meant you either got an undeserved reputation as a complete slapper or you aroused rage amongst the local lads who didn’t take kindly to being constantly given the cold shoulder.

Sex appeal was all very well for Hollywood starlets, Hannah felt, but for normal women it brought sheer, unending hassle. Well, she amended, with a smidgen of guilty pleasure, her sex appeal had given her the delectable Jeff. But he had overstayed his welcome so it was time for Sexy Hannah to disappear and Ms Cojones of Steel Campbell to take her place.

She expertly coiled her wet hair into a scrunchie and fixed her visitor with the steely look she’d perfected when departing hotel guests insisted they’d had only two drinks in the hotel bar the previous night instead of the ten doubles itemized on their bar bill.

‘Jeff, you’ve got to get out of the bath and leave. I need to be out the door in three-quarters of an hour and I need time to myself. Come on, now.’

Responding to her schoolmarm voice the way he hadn’t responded to her gentle wheedling, Jeff climbed out of the bath, stood in front of her and stretched, his splendid naked body dripping water on to the black and white tile-effect lino.

Hannah couldn’t help staring. God, he was beautiful: from his short blond hair down to his big feet. Six foot of rippling muscle without a flaw anywhere. Poor Michelangelo would have killed to sculpt something like Jeff Williams.

Hannah gulped as she tried to concentrate on what she simply had to do in the next hour. Packing and sorting out her guide books. She wanted to learn something from this holiday and she’d hoped to spend a while reading her Let’s Go: Egypt so that she wouldn’t embarrass herself in front of all the other people on the trip, people who probably knew about history and mythology…Then Jeff smiled a slow, lazy smile and traced one finger along her chest until it hooked under her towel and pulled, tumbling the towel to the floor along with her mental timetable.

Oh, what the hell, thought Hannah, letting her sex drive shift into fifth gear. After all those evenings trying to forget what physical pleasure had been like and watching endless re-runs of Inspector Morse, she deserved this. It wouldn’t take her that long to pack. She could read her guide book on the plane.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Lord! Would you look at the mess in here. I’m all for salads but you’ve really got to take them out of those awful little white plastic containers when you get them home. They leak everywhere. What’s this?’ Anne-Marie O’Brien squinted over her glasses at the supermarket label on the tub of couscous which had made an oily puddle in the middle of the otherwise spotless fridge. ‘Couscous? Messy, that’s what it is.’

Emma Sheridan said nothing as her mother searched for a clean J-cloth, rinsed it out in hot water and then zealously scrubbed the middle shelf of the fridge with the help of a bottle of antiseptic kitchen cleaner Emma had forgotten she’d possessed and had meant to throw out. An overpowering scent of pine disinfectant filled the room. It smelled nothing like any pine tree Emma had ever come across, unless pines were mating with bleach factories these days.

‘Much better now,’ Mrs O’Brien said, straightening up. She briskly rinsed the cloth out again, inspected the rest of the kitchen with narrowed eyes, then gave the melamine surfaces a quick squirt of cleaner, her every movement the work of an expert with a PhD in Cleaning the Home. Only then did she take the precious Tupperware and tinfoil-wrapped parcels and place them carefully in the fridge, giving her daughter a commentary on her actions at the same time.

‘Can’t have poor Peter eating that supermarket stuff. Proper dinners is what he should have. I know your father wouldn’t touch anything that had to be microwaved, but if I was away from him for a week, it’d be a different matter. Husbands! I’ve made lasagne that’ll last for at least two days, shepherd’s pie for tonight and these two are chicken and mushroom pies – I’ll put them in the freezer part. Emma, dear! Do you ever defrost this thing? It won’t do it itself. Never mind, I’ll just sort it out…’

Emma tuned out. Thirty-one-years of her mother had taught her that listening to the ‘nobody does things the right way, my way’ monologue would put you in a mental home if you didn’t tune out. Especially when the monologue was designed to tell you what a slatternly housekeeper/student/driver you were and how your poor husband would drop dead from salmonella if you didn’t start boil washing both the tea towels and his underpants immediately.

It was immaterial that Emma had spent most of the previous day cleaning and polishing Number 27 The Beeches from top to bottom; immaterial that she’d used up her precious day off work cleaning instead of swanning around the shops buying last-minute bits and bobs for her holiday. She’d toyed with the idea of going into Debenhams to see if she could get one of those black uplift bikinis she’d spotted in a magazine. Even if you were as flat as a pancake boob-wise, this bikini would give you a cleavage that’d take the sight out of people’s eyes, or so the magazine claimed.

As the only way Emma’s cleavage was going to take somebody’s eye out was if a wire from one of her AA cups escaped and actually poked them in the eye, she desperately needed a new uplift bikini.

But as usual, the only overdeveloped part of her person, namely guilt, had swung into action and put the kibosh on the shopping trip. Emma’s sense of guilt was like a medical textbook description of the heart: a large muscle which contracts unconsciously. Guilt at leaving Peter on his own at home for an entire week while she sailed down the Nile with her parents overcame her desire for a skilfully padded bikini, so she’d given Debenhams a miss and spring-cleaned the house instead. Peter, who wouldn’t notice if he had to eat his dinner off the table because they’d run out of plates, would be unaware of her feverish scrubbing. However, Emma’s Guiltometer had worked out that an entire day of cleaning would go a long way (fifty-five per cent) to making up for having a holiday without her beloved husband. Buying him an enormous present she couldn’t afford and cooking him his favourite dinners for a week after her return would almost compensate for the remaining forty-five per cent.

Sadly, she’d forgotten to buy new rubber gloves for the cleaning fest so her hands were now dry as an overcooked chicken thanks to scrubbing the toilet bowls with bleach. But the house was a veritable palace, with clean carpets, clean loos and not an unironed item of clothing anywhere.

All that and her mother was still tut-tutting over the only visible blemish in the entire premises. Emma could just picture Pete wrenching open the couscous and eating it with his finger beside the fridge that morning, shoving the greasy tub back in carelessly afterwards before grabbing the orange juice carton for breakfast. He adored couscous – and he hated shepherd’s pie with a vengeance. Still, what was the point of telling her mother that? Anne-Marie O’Brien wouldn’t listen: she never listened to anyone. Except her husband, James P. O’Brien, boss of O’Brien’s Heating Contractors, master of all he surveyed and the person who absolutely always had to have the last word on every subject.

Emma sat down wearily on one of her kitchen chairs and examined her newly painted nails. The rosy pink colour she’d bought for her holiday was pretty but still didn’t camouflage either the bleach damage or the nibbled bits. She’d chewed her index fingernail into an ugly stub during a long phone conversation the night before where her mother had fussed about the heat in Egypt, the food, the locals, the thought of covering up her shoulders at tourist sites and ‘…would your father be able to get proper milk for his tea.’ That idea had summoned up a bizarre mental picture of her father trying to milk a camel, him red and sweating as he stood with his teacup in one hand and a camel teat in the other.

She nibbled a stray sticking up bit of index fingernail. Well, who’d be looking at her bloody nails anyway. She felt too tired to care: she hoped she could sleep on the plane to Egypt. If she could steal one of her mother’s Valium tablets, she could blank out the entire journey.

While her mother busied herself with the fridge, Emma surreptitiously touched her breasts through the soft fabric of her denim dungarees. She’d been doing it all day, giving herself a pleasurable thrill that had nothing to do with sex. This thrill was provided by her biological clock heaving a sigh of relief. Nervously, she slid one hand under her T-shirt to reach her bare breast and touched it cautiously. Sensitive, definitely.

They’d looked bigger in the mirror earlier, she was sure of it. The nipples were bigger, weren’t they? Yes, yes, yes, she grinned. She was pregnant. It was quite incredible how happy she felt when she thought about the baby, her baby. The glow filled her up inside, like that advert for breakfast cereal where the boy cycling to school was lit from within because he’d eaten his Ready Brek that morning. Emma felt lit from within with a combination of sheer joy and relief. Relief that after so long hoping, it was finally happening. She wanted to dance around the room with delight, but her natural caution advised her to be careful. Say nothing to jinx it. Wait until you’re sure and then tell darling Pete the wonderful news, she told herself. All she had to do was get through the hateful week with her parents and then everything would be wonderful. Her secret would keep her going during the next week. It was only a week, after all.

Ignoring the ‘this place is a mess’ monologue, she picked up a pad from the table and began writing a quick note to Pete, telling him she loved him and would miss him desperately.

‘Well, madam, having a rest while your poor mother works as usual.’

The sound of her father’s voice made Emma jump to her feet guiltily. She felt as if she really was doing something wrong, the way she felt when she passed a police car with a radar gun out the window, even if she was only crawling along at thirty miles an hour. His very presence could plunge her into nervous tension, even now when she was so very hopeful about her precious baby.

‘Anne-Marie, there’s really no need to be doing Emma’s dirty work for her,’ Jimmy O’Brien said, treating his elder daughter to a disapproving stare. ‘She’s big enough and ugly enough to do her own housework. I won’t have you skivvying for her.’

‘I wasn’t skivvying,’ said her mother, her voice losing its liveliness and becoming weary.

‘Mother was just rubbing up something spilt,’ Emma protested, feeling all her good humour fade away as it so inevitably did whenever her father was involved. ‘I cleaned that fridge out yesterday…’

But her father was no longer listening. Striding over to the bin, he knocked out the old tobacco at the bottom of his pipe and began to fill his wife in on his recent activities.

‘I’ve filled the car with petrol, checked the air in the tyres and put in half a litre of oil,’ he announced. ‘We’re all shipshape, if you’re ready to go, Anne-Marie.’

You’d think we were driving to bloody Egypt, Emma thought with irritation.

For about the hundredth time since the trip had been booked, she wondered why she was going. It had been her father’s idea: the holiday of a lifetime to celebrate his and his wife’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Emma couldn’t figure out why he’d picked such an exotic destination as Egypt. Her father was a man who, for the past fifteen years, had been perfectly content to go to Portugal, sit watching sports coverage in a bar and comment loudly on how downmarket the place was getting what with all the football hooligans and brazen young girls running around with suitcases full of condoms looking for men.

‘Tarts,’ he’d say darkly every time a gang of carefree, tanned girls in skimpy T-shirts and bum-skimming shorts appeared on the scene.

Emma used to gaze wistfully at these modern babes: she was damn sure they wouldn’t still be going on holiday with their parents when they were in their twenties, too afraid of the furore to suggest a holiday with their boyfriends. Until she’d been married, she and Pete had only been away to the sun once when she’d pretended to be away with some girlfriends.

His comments about how young people’s standards were dropping notwithstanding, her father appeared to enjoy Portugal. But one holiday programme presenter enthusing over a Nile cruise had changed everything. Jimmy had ordered a vast assortment of brochures and spent many happy hours over Sunday lunch reading out the bits he was most interested in.

‘Listen to this,’ he’d say, blithely interrupting any other conversation with the insensitivity of a despot, ‘ “Enjoy the spectacle of Luxor and Karnak temples. Both monuments are perfect examples of ancient Egyptian architecture. Parts of Karnak Temple date back to 1375 BC.” That’s bloody incredible, we’ve got to go.’

Unfortunately, the ‘we’ also meant Pete and Emma.

‘No way, Emma. Why can’t they go on their own and just make each other miserable instead of making us all miserable,’ Pete complained, which was quite an out of character thing for him to say. Genuinely kind and warm, Pete couldn’t be nasty if he tried, but even his legendary patience was strained by her parents. Well, her father, really. Jimmy O’Brien strained a lot of people’s patience.

‘I know, love,’ Emma said wearily. She felt so torn; torn between doing what easy-going Pete wanted and what her domineering father wanted. ‘It’s just that he hasn’t stopped talking about it and he’s assuming we’ll go too. He’ll harp on about how ungrateful we are if we don’t go.’ Emma didn’t need to say any more. Ever since her father had loaned herself and Pete the deposit money for their house, he’d been holding it over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

Going out with friends for Sunday instead of going to the O’Briens’ for lunch was seen as a sign of ungratefulness. So was being too busy to pick up Jimmy’s new bifocals from that shop in town, or not being able to drive Anne-Marie to the shops because she’d got nervous about driving her own car for some unaccountable reason. The way things were going, the next time Emma refused a liquorice on the grounds that she didn’t like the taste, that too would be seen as ungratefulness.

Pete said nothing more about the trip. Emma knew he wanted her to stand up to her father for once and refuse to go so that they could spend the money going away together later. But Emma, who knew she’d feel guilty about leaving Pete but would suffer ten times more if she crossed Jimmy O’Brien, finally figured out a solution.

‘Pete can’t go to Egypt that week, Dad,’ she lied. ‘He’s got a two-day conference in Belfast. But I’ll go – won’t that be nice, just the three of us together, like old times?’

The old times reference did the trick. Which was ironic, Emma thought. Her memory of bygone holidays consisted of the feeling that they’d merely changed the setting for her father’s daily sarcastic remarks. But, hilariously, he didn’t see it like that: Jimmy was delighted with the holiday plan.

Pete was staying at home, sweetly telling Emma that it was all right, he’d go away with the lads for a football weekend later in the year, so she wasn’t to worry. All she had to do now was actually get through the damn trip.

‘I think I need a cup of tea before I go,’ her mother said, dropping the cloth and leaning against Emma’s sink, the perfect picture of fatigue. Her mother’s put-upon act was like a red rag to a bull where Jimmy was concerned. Somebody had to be to blame for his wife’s exhaustion.

Emma knew what would come next: she’d have to make tea and be berated for making her poor mother do her housework. There was no point explaining what had really happened. This particular tableau had taken place so many times over the years, they were all like pantomime characters acting out parts they’d played for thirty years.

You’re a lazy, stupid girl, Emma.

Oh no I’m not!

Oh yes you are!

Emma watched her parents dispassionately for a moment, watched them taking over her house as if they owned it. She really wasn’t in the mood for a re-run of their familiar power-play game.

She’d recognized what it was ever since she’d bought the self-help books. Her father was a control freak and her mother was passive aggressive, able to slip into her ‘poor me’ routine as soon as her husband appeared in order to be fussed over. Or so it seemed. All the books had different variations on this type of relationship but Emma could see her parents in each one.

However, while it was all very well knowing what people were, it was a different kettle of fish altogether figuring out what to do about it. As Emma had long since worked out that she was plain old passive and desperately lacking in self-confidence when it came to her family, there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about their behaviour.

Her problem was herself, she had realized from Chapter Seven: ‘Taking Responsibility For Your Own Mistakes’. There was no use spending hours bitterly contemplating her family’s behaviour without changing her own. She let them get away with it. Only she could change things.

‘The power is within your own grasp,’ said guru Cheyenne Kawada, author of You Only Have One Life To Lead, So Don’t Waste It.

The problem was that she was two people: with her parents, she was clumsy Emma, the elder, less successful daughter – Kirsten was the prodigal – and the one who’d sidestepped a job in her father’s business (the only time she’d ever refused him anything). In the office, she was Emma Sheridan, the much admired Special Projects Coordinator of the KrisisKids Charity who had several people working for her and who organized the charity’s confidential child phoneline as well as two conferences a year.

Her parents had no idea that the businesslike, organized Emma existed, and certainly nobody at KKC would have recognized the put-upon Emma as their capable boss.

‘You sit down, love, let me make the tea,’ Jimmy O’Brien was saying manfully to his wife as he rummaged through Emma’s tidy cupboards for teabags, sending packets of sauce mixes and a jar of soy sauce flying.

Her mother waved the idea away, as if she was dying for a cup but had heroically decided to say no, like someone refusing a life jacket on the Titanic. ‘We don’t have enough time, Jimmy.’

‘We would have time if you hadn’t worn yourself to the bone tidying up after this lazy madam.’ Slamming the cupboard, Jimmy harrumphed and his entire body shook with the noise. His huge cream jumper-clad frame dwarfed everything in the compact room. He was easily as tall as the pine larder and just as wide, big shoulders and flowing white beard making him a dead ringer for Santa Claus.

Luckily for Anne-Marie O’Brien, she wasn’t Mrs Claus to her husband’s Santa. Tall but melba toast thin, her hair was a carefully dyed fading gold, worn long but with a front section drawn back from her forehead with a large hairclip that sat at the back of her head like an ossified tortoiseshell beetle. In her floral belted summer dress, she looked as trim as the housewife in a fifties commercial and amazingly youthful. Ten years younger than her husband, Anne-Marie had the clear unwrinkled skin of someone who was utterly sure she was going to heaven in the afterlife, thanks to her goodness and her constant devout prayers. She’d never contemplated whether her love of spreading gossip might hinder her immediate path to the Pearly Gates.

Emma, as tall and slim as her mother but with silky, pale brown hair and a sweet, patient face instead of a smug one, watched tight-lipped as her mother meticulously wiped the chrome-plated toaster and kettle, oblivious to the fact that they needed to be polished with a dry cloth if you didn’t want to leave big smeary streaks on them.

Pete’s favourite present from their wedding three years ago, the chrome appliances were by far the poshest things in their kitchen. Dear Pete. He always told her to ‘turn the other cheek’ when her father irritated her. Pete’s devout upbringing had equipped him with a biblical quote for every situation in life. He was certainly right this time. No matter how hard it was to stoically turn the other cheek when Jimmy O’Brien’s famously sharp tongue carved you up, Emma knew it was the only way to cope. Arguing with her father merely drove him into the white-hot rage of ‘I’m only doing this for your own good, madam.’

‘Turn the other cheek,’ she repeated mantra-like, slipping out of the kitchen. She went upstairs to her and Pete’s bedroom. Decorated in a mixture of forest green and warm olive, it was the most masculine room in the house.

Emma had picked the colours herself, determined that the first bedroom she slept in as a married woman would be nothing like the frilled, pink chintz girlie rooms her mother had insisted on in the family home. After a lifetime living with more frills than Scarlett O’Hara’s wedding dress, Emma had wanted a room that was comfortingly simple. Pete, so laid back décor-wise that he’d have slept happily in a Wendy house, said he’d like anything Emma chose.

So she’d picked simple olive green curtains, a modern blonde wood bed with its stark green duvet cover and had painted the fitted wardrobe unit that surrounded the bed in cool cream. There wasn’t a flounce, a ribbon or a ballerina print in sight. The Flower Fairies drawings her mother had donated ‘to brighten the place up’ had pride of place in the downstairs loo because Emma never went in there except to clean it.

‘Are you coming, Emma?’ demanded her father from downstairs.

Picking up her handbag and her suitcase, Emma struggled out on to the landing, with one last fond look at her bedroom. She’d miss it. And Pete. She’d miss cuddling up to him in bed, feeling his solid body spooned against hers. She’d miss his sense of fun and the way he loved her so much. Emma could do no wrong in Pete Sheridan’s eyes, which was certainly a change from the way her parents felt about her.

They stood at the bottom of the stairs, one impatient, the other anxious.

‘You’re not wearing that, Emma?’ said her mother in a shrill tone as Emma rounded the bend in the stairs, suitcase in hand.

Instinctively, one hand shot up to her chest, touching the soft denim fabric of her dungarees. Cool and very comfortable, they were ideal for travelling. ‘I was wearing this when you came in,’ Emma muttered, wishing she didn’t feel like a teenager being chastised for wearing PVC hot-pants to dinner with the bishop.

She was a thirty-one-year-old married woman, for God’s sake! She would not be bullied.

‘I thought you’d gone up to change,’ sighed her mother in martyred tones. ‘I’d prefer to travel looking respectable. I’ve read that people who dress up for travel are most likely to get upgraded,’ she added with a satisfied sniff at the thought of being escorted past the riffraff to a luxury bit of the plane worthy of the O’Briens of the poshest bit of Castleknock.

‘Well, you’d better go and put on another outfit, hadn’t you? Or we’ll be later,’ Jimmy said impatiently.

Emma decided not to mention that their chances of being upgraded were non-existent because there was no first class on a charter flight. Her mother’s fantasies about an elegant lifestyle never had the slightest basis in reality, so what was the point?

For a moment, she toyed with the idea of saying she wasn’t changing her outfit. But the sight of her father’s taut face made up her mind. As she’d learned during her twenty-eight years living under her father’s roof, he hated ‘butch’ clothes and women in trousers.

‘I’ll just be a moment,’ she said with false gaiety and ran back upstairs.

In the bedroom, she got down on her knees and banged her head on the bed. Coward! You decided yesterday that your dungarees were perfect for travelling in. You should have said something!

Still berating herself, Emma fished the little red book out from under her side of the bed and opened it on the affirmation page: ‘I am a positive person. I am a good person. My thoughts and feelings are worthwhile and valid.’

Repeating those three phrases over and over again, Emma ripped off her dungarees and T-shirt and pulled on a cream knitted long skirt and tunic she sometimes wore to work in the summer when all her other clothes were in the wash.

Today, all her decent summer clothes were in the suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. Bought on a hateful shopping trip with her mother, the cream knit suit made her look like an anaemic café latte come to life – tall, straight as a schoolboy and colourless.

While the soft blues of her denim clothes made her pale blue eyes with the amber flecks stand out, creams and taupes reduced her face to monotones: pale skin, pale hair, pale bloody everything. She sighed; she felt so boring and colourless.

She’d never been good with make-up and, anyway, lipstick only made her thin lips look even thinner. If only she’d had the courage to have a nose job, Emma thought. Long and too big for her face, it was hideous. Barry Manilow’s nose was practically retroussé beside hers. Wearing her fringe long was the only way to hide it. Her sister Kirsten had been blessed with the looks in their family. She was vibrant, sexy and a huge hit with the male of the species who loved her unusual sense of style and her joie de vivre. The only unusual thing about Emma was her voice, a low, husky growl that seemed at odds with her conservative, shy image. Pete always told her she could have worked in radio with a voice like that.

‘What you mean is that I sound like a bombshell so I’d be perfect for radio where people can’t see me and realize I’m not one,’ she’d tease him.

‘You’re a bombshell to me,’ he’d say lovingly.

‘Come on,’ roared her father from downstairs. ‘We’ll be late.’

Emma closed her eyes for a brief moment. The idea of an entire week with her parents made her dizzy. She must have been mad to agree to go with them.

She’d always wanted to go to Egypt and take a Nile cruise, longed to go since she’d first read about the dazzling Queen Nefertiti and the beauty of Karnak Temple as a child. But she’d dreamed of going with Pete, Emma thought miserably, tucking her self-help book into her small handbag.

She hadn’t planned to bring Positive For Life – Your Guide To Increasing Your Self-Esteem by Dr Barbra Rose with her. She must have been off her rocker. On this trip, she wouldn’t simply need the book – she’d need Dr Rose herself, complete with a case packed with the most cutting-edge pharmacology to keep her father in a coma. Now that would be the holiday of a lifetime.

Satisfied that her daughter was now suitably dressed and wouldn’t disgrace the family en route to the pleasures of the Nile, Anne-Marie O’Brien happily kept up her monologue all the way to the airport: ‘You’ll never guess who I met this morning,’ she said cosily, with not the slightest intention of drawing breath long enough for either Emma or her father to guess. ‘Mrs Page. Lord Almighty, if you could have seen the get up she was wearing. Jeans. At her age! I wouldn’t have bothered to talk to her at all, but she was beside the toothpaste and I wanted an extra tube in case I can’t get any when we’re away. I can’t imagine the Egyptians will be too keen on the hygiene products,’ she added.

Squashed in the back seat of the Opel with the luggage threatening to fall on top of her every time they went round a corner, Emma closed her eyes wearily. Was there any point in explaining that the Egyptians lived in a sophisticated, highly civilized society, built the pyramids and studied astronomy when the O’Brien ancestors were still banging rocks together and trying to figure out how to make things with sharp stones?

‘…If you’d heard her going on about that Antoinette of hers, well.’ Mrs O’Brien’s voice registered the fiercest of disapproval. ‘Scandalous, that’s what it is. Living with that man with two children and not a ring on her finger. Does she not think that those little children deserve the sanctity of marriage instead of being…’ her voice sank to a whisper, ‘illegitimate!’

‘Illegitimacy doesn’t exist any more.’ Emma had to say something. Antoinette was a friend of hers.

‘It’s all very well for you to say that,’ her mother said, ‘but it’s not right or proper. It’s a mockery of the Church and the ceremonies. That girl is making a rod for her own back, mark my words. That man’ll up and leave her. She should have got married like normal people do.’

‘He’s separated, Mum. He can’t get married until his divorce comes through.’

‘That’s more of it, Emma. I can’t understand young people today. Does the catechism mean nothing to them? At least your father and I never had any problems like that with you. I told Mrs Page you and Peter were so settled and happy, that Peter is Assistant Sales Director at Devine’s Paper Company and that you’re Special Projects Co ordinator.’ Pleasure at remembering a most enjoyable bit of boasting made Mrs O’Brien smile.

‘He’s one of the assistant sales directors, Mum,’ Emma said in vexation. ‘There are six of them, you know.’

‘I didn’t say anything wrong,’ her mother insisted, tart at being corrected. ‘And you are Special Projects Coordinator. We are so proud of our little girl, aren’t we, Jimmy?’

Her father never took his eyes off the road where he was busily making it a dangerous morning for cyclists. ‘We are,’ he said absently. ‘Very proud. Of both of you. I always knew our Kirsten would do well,’ he said happily. ‘Chip off the old block there.’

Emma smiled weakly and made a mental note to phone Antoinette Page when she got home to apologize for her mother’s insensitive remarks, which would no doubt have filtered through by then. If Anne-Marie O’Brien continued boasting about Peter and Emma’s brilliant careers as if they were rocket scientists with matching Porsches and millions in the bank, they wouldn’t have a friend left. Pete worked as a salesman in an office-supply company and her job involved huge amounts of exhausting work of the envelope-stuffing-and-organizing-shifts variety rather than swanning around at posh charity lunches, which was the way her mother explained KrisisKids to everyone.

Emma’s job was administration rather than fund-raising. She organized the phoneline, which abused or frightened kids could phone anonymously, as well as taking care of the day-to-day running of the KrisisKids office. There were glamorous lunches where rich, well-connected ladies paid hundreds of pounds for a ticket, but Emma never went to those functions, to her mother’s dismay.

Still, Emma thought, determined to see the positive side of things, it was nice to think that her parents were proud of her, even if they only voiced it when they were trying to lord it over other people, and never to her personally. Naturally, they were prouder of her younger sister Kirsten. It was just as well that Emma adored Kirsten, because a lifetime of hearing how clever/pretty/cute Kirsten was could have destroyed any relationship between the sisters. But they were close, in spite of Jimmy’s unwittingly divisive tactics.

‘Mrs Page was delighted to hear about Kirsten’s new house in Castleknock,’ Anne-Marie continued. ‘I told her there were five en suite bathrooms and that Patrick was driving a…oh, what’s that car called?’

‘Lexus,’ Jimmy supplied.

‘That’s it. “Hasn’t she done well for herself?” I said. And I told her Kirsten didn’t have to work any more but was involved in raising funds for that environmental project…’

Emma could have written a book on her younger sister’s achievements as dictated proudly by her mother. Kirsten had managed to pull off the treble whammy of marrying an incredibly rich stockbroker, avoiding seeing her parents except at Christmas, and still being the prodigal daughter all at the same time.

Even though she loved Kirsten and, with only one year between them, they’d grown up almost like twins, Emma was sick and tired of hearing about how wonderful Kirsten’s charity work was when she knew for a fact that her sister was only interested in environmental charity on the grounds that she might meet Sting and so that she had something to talk about with the other ladies who lunched when they were teeing up at the ninth. Emma was also fed up with the way Kirsten and Patrick managed to wriggle out of all the Sunday lunches, leaving Pete and herself to suffer through at least seven hours of ‘What I Think is Wrong With the World – A Personal View by Jimmy O’Brien’ every two weeks. Driving home after the last lunchtime rant against emigrants arriving in Ireland looking for work, Pete had asked Emma if there was such a word as ‘pan-got’.

‘What’s that?’ she’d asked merrily, happy in the knowledge that their duty was done for another fortnight.

‘A person who’s bigoted against everything and everyone. You know, the way “pan” means everything.’

‘Probably not until Dad came along, but I’m sure we could tape him and send it into the Oxford English Dictionary people,’ she suggested. ‘Pan-got would be in the next edition, certainly.’

Anne-Marie was fretting as they neared the airport. ‘I hope Kirsten will be all right for the week; she told me on the phone that Patrick is going to be away.’

Emma raised her eyes to heaven. In direct contrast to herself, Kirsten was one of life’s survivors. Put her on the north face of the Eiger with nothing but a tent and a jar of Bovril and she’d turn up twenty-four hours later with a tan from skiing, lots of new clothes and a host of phone numbers from all the other interesting people she’d met en route, who’d all have yachts, villas in Gstaad, personal trainers and Rolexes. A week without Patrick meant Kirsten would have carte blanche to go mad with her gold card in Brown Thomas’s and would end up knocking back vodka tonics in some nightclub every evening, with a besotted admirer in tow. Emma didn’t think her sister had been unfaithful to her stolid and reliable husband, but she certainly enjoyed flirting with other men.

‘She’ll be fine, Mum,’ Emma said drily.

At the airport, her father let them off outside the departures hall with all the luggage and then drove off to find a parking spot. Anne-Marie went into fuss mode immediately: tranquil when her husband was there and bossing everyone around, she became anxious and hyper as soon as he was out of sight.

‘My glasses,’ she said suddenly as she and Emma joined the slow-moving queue at the check-in desk. ‘I don’t think I brought them!’

The note of rising hysteria in her mother’s voice made Emma gently take her hand and pat it comfortingly. ‘Will I look in your handbag, Mum?’ she said.

Anne-Marie nodded and thrust the small cream leather bag at her. The glasses were in the side compartment in their worn tapestry case, blindingly obvious if only her mother had looked.

‘They were here all the time, Mum.’

Her mother’s anxiety faded a little. ‘I’m sure I’ve forgotten something,’ she said. Closing her eyes as if running through a mental list, she was silent for a minute. ‘Have you forgotten something?’ she said abruptly.

Emma shook her head.

‘Sanitary stuff and things like that,’ her mother hissed, sotto voce. ‘Who knows what you’ll be able to buy out there. I bet you forgot. I should have got some for you this morning in the supermarket, but that Mrs Page took my mind quite off what I was doing…’

Emma tried to tune out, but her mother’s words mocked her. Sanitary stuff. She probably should have brought tampons with her but had hoped it would be tempting fate to bring them.

Her period was due in four days and maybe it wouldn’t come this time. This could be it: pregnant! She’d been so tired all week and she was sure her nipples felt sensitive, the way her pregnancy book said they would. They never felt like that normally. So she’d been reckless and left all her period paraphernalia out of her suitcase, hadn’t brought even one single tampon or pair of heavy-duty, enormous knickers in case they would bring her bad luck. Emma allowed herself a little quiver of excitement at the thought.

When her father marched up to them, giving out yards about how far away he’d had to park the car, Emma managed to look sympathetic.

‘All set then?’ he asked. ‘Let’s queue.’

He put one arm round his wife. ‘Egypt, eh? This will be a holiday to remember, Anne-Marie, love. I just wish dear Kirsten could have come along. She’d love it and she’s the best company in the world. Still, she’s busy with her charity work and looking after Patrick.’ He sighed a fond father sort of sigh and Emma started nibbling the thumbnail she’d managed to leave alone up to now.

Calm down, she repeated to herself, using the broken-record technique so beloved of her self-help books. Don’t let him get to you. She could cope with him when she had this wonderful feeling of hope lighting her up from the inside. A baby. She had to be pregnant this time, she just knew it.

CHAPTER THREE

Penny lay on the bed with a half-chewed teddy squashed between her golden paws and stared at Leonie balefully. It was hard to imagine that those huge brown eyes could portray anything other than pure canine love but then, Penny was not your average dog. Half-Labrador, half-retriever, she was all personality. Most of it human and all calculated to cause her owner the most guilt possible. Only her frenzied excitement at the rattle of her dinner bowl made Leonie realize that her best friend was actually a dog and not a person. Then again, Leonie thought with amusement, why did she confer ravenousness as purely doggy behaviour? She ate like a pig herself. Dogs and owners invariably looked alike so if Penny was a slightly overweight little glutton who was a slave to Pedigree Chum, then her owner was a carbon copy. A large shaggy blonde with a fat tummy and a propensity for biscuits. Just exchange Mr Chum for Mr Kipling and they were twins.

Leonie extracted an ancient khaki sarong from the back of the cupboard and rolled it into a corner of her suitcase alongside a selection of her trademark exotically coloured silk shirts. Penny, watching sulkily from the bed, snorted loudly.

‘I know, Honey Bunny,’ Leonie said consolingly, stopping packing to sit on the edge of the bed and stroke her inconsolable dog. ‘I won’t be long. It’s only eight days. Mummy won’t be away for long. And you wouldn’t like Egypt, darling. It’s too hot anyway.’

Penny, seven years of abject devotion and huge amounts of spoiling behind her, refused to be comforted and jerked her head away from Leonie’s gentle hand. Another little snort indicated that mere petting wouldn’t be enough and that doggy biscuits might have to be involved if she was to be satisfactorily cheered up.

Leonie – who’d only the previous morning told a Pekinese-owning client in the veterinary practice where she worked as a nurse, that dogs were terrible blackmailers and that little Kibushi shouldn’t be given human food no matter how much he begged at the table at mealtimes – hurried into the kitchen for a Mixed Oval and half a digestive biscuit.

Like a Persian potentate receiving gifts, Penny graciously accepted both biscuits, got crumbs all over the flowery duvet as she crunched them and immediately went back to sulking. One paw flattening Teddy ominously, she stared at Leonie crossly, her usually smiling Labrador face creased into a look that said, I’m phoning the ISPCA now, and then where will you be? Up in court on charges of cruelty to animals, that’s where. Imagine abandoning me for a crappy holiday.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t go,’ Leonie said in despair, thinking that she couldn’t possibly leave Penny, Clover and Herman for eight whole days. Penny would waste away, despite being cared for by Leonie’s adoring mother, Claire, who let her sleep on the bed all the time and fed her carefully cooked lambs’ liver.

But Leonie’s three children had gone to stay with their father in the States for three weeks and Leonie had vowed to give herself the holiday of a lifetime just to cheer herself up. She couldn’t let herself be blackmailed by spoiled animals. Really, she couldn’t.

Clover, Leonie’s beloved marmalade cat, didn’t get on with Claire’s cats, hated the cattery and would no doubt lurk miserably at the back of her quarters for the entire visit, going on feline hunger strike, determined to look like an anorexic for her owner’s return. And even Herman, the children’s rescued hamster, went into a decline when his luxury hamster duplex was moved into Claire’s home. All right, so Claire’s three Siamese cats had an unnatural interest in little Hermie and did spend many hours staring at his Perspex home in a very calculating manner as if figuring out exactly how yummy he’d taste once they’d worked out how to open the trap door, but still…it wasn’t abandonment.

Nevertheless Leonie felt guilty leaving her beloved babies while she went cruising down the Nile in the luxury of an inside cabin on the Queen Tiye (single supplement £122, Abu Simbel excursion and Valley of the Kings dawn balloon trip extra, bookable in advance).

‘I shouldn’t go,’ she said again.

Penny, sensing weakness, wagged her tail a fraction and smiled winsomely. For good measure, she pounced on Teddy and chewed him in a playfully endearing way. How could you leave cute, adorable me? she said, her degree in Manipulation of Humans coming to the fore.

What was the point? Leonie wondered, weakening. She could have her eight days off at home and make herself tackle the bit of overgrown garden down by the river. Why own an artisan’s cottage on an eighth of an acre in County Wicklow’s scenic Greystones if you let the garden run to rack and ruin with enough floral wildlife for a butterfly sanctuary?

And she could paint the cupboards in the kitchen. She’d been meaning to do that for the entire seven years they’d lived there. She hated dark wood, always had.

Oh yes, and she could clean out Danny’s bedroom. He and the girls had been in Boston for nearly ten days already and she hadn’t yet touched his pit. No doubt the usual teenage debris was festering beneath his bed: socks that smelled like mouldy cheese and old T-shirts that had enough human DNA on them in the form of sweat to be used for cloning. The girls’ room was perfect because Abby had been overcome with a fit of tidiness one afternoon before they’d left and had forced Mel to help her clean up. Together they’d filled a bin-bag with old Mizz magazines, cuddly toys that even Penny no longer wanted to chew, old pens with no lids and copybooks with half the pages torn out. As a consequence, their room looked so tidy it was unlikely to be identified as the bedroom of two pop star obsessed fourteen-year-olds – apart from the dog-eared poster of Robbie Williams that Mel had refused to be parted from.

‘Don’t get upset, Mum,’ Abby had said when Leonie had looked into the bedroom and blurted out that it looked as if the girls were leaving for ever and not coming back. ‘We’ll only be away with Dad for just over three weeks. You’ll be having such a whale of a time in Egypt and out every night drinking and flirting with handsome men that you won’t notice we’re gone.’

‘I know,’ Leonie lied, feeling terribly foolish and sorry she’d broken her golden rule about not letting the children know how terrible it was for her when they spent time with their father. It wasn’t that she begrudged Ray time with his children: not at all. She simply missed them so much when they were staying with him and Boston seemed such a long way away. At least when he’d lived in Belfast, it had only been a couple of hours away from Dublin. Leonie wouldn’t have dreamed of gatecrashing her children’s visit with their father, but she was always comforted by the idea that if she wanted to see them on a whim during the month-long summer holiday, she could.

That was partly why she was off to Egypt on a holiday she couldn’t really afford: to stave off the pangs of loneliness while the kids were away. That and because she had to break out of the cycle of her humdrum existence. An exotic holiday away seemed like a good starting point for a new, exotic life. Or at least it had.

The phone on her bedside table rang loudly. Leonie sat on the bed and picked up the receiver, straightening the silver-framed picture of herself and Danny beside the roller coaster at EuroDisney as she did so. Nineteen-year-olds didn’t go on holidays with their mothers any more, she reminded herself, knowing there’d be no more holidays with the four of them ever again.

‘I hope you’re not having second thoughts,’ bellowed a voice down the phone. Anita. Loud, lovable and bossier than a First Division football manager, Leonie’s oldest friend could speak in only two volumes: pitch-side screech and stage whisper, both of which could be heard from fifty yards away.

‘You need a break and, seeing as you won’t come to West Cork with the gang, I think Egypt’s perfect. But don’t let that damn dog put you off.’

Leonie grinned. ‘Penny’s very depressed,’ she admitted, ‘and I have been having second thoughts about going on a trip on my own.’

‘And waste your money?’ roared Anita, a coupon-snipping mother of four who’d re-use teabags if she could get away with it.

Leonie knew she couldn’t bear another holiday in the big rented bungalow with ‘the gang’, as Anita called the group who’d been together for over twenty years since they’d met up as newly weds all in Sycamore Lawns. Gangs were fine when you were part of it in happy coupledom, but when you were divorced and everyone else was still in happy coupledom, it wasn’t as easy.

Being the only single member of the gang was sheer hell and would be worse now that Tara (briefly unattached) had remarried and was no longer keen on sharing a room with Leonie where they could moan about the pain of singledom and the lack of decent men. After last year’s group holiday where one husband had surprised her with a drunken French kiss and an ‘I’ve always thought you were a goer’ grope in the kitchen late one night, Leonie had promised herself never again.

When she and Ray had split up ten years ago, she’d been so hopeful about her future. After a decade of a companionable but practically fraternal marriage, they’d both been hopeful of the future. But Ray was the one who’d come through it all with flying colours, happy with his string of girlfriends, and Leonie was still longing for the one true love who’d make it all worthwhile.

She hadn’t been on a date for six years and that had been a blind one Anita had fixed up with a college lecturer who was a dead ringer – in every sense – for Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Needless to say, it hadn’t been a success.

‘Leonie, there’s always a bed for you in West Cork,’ Anita interrupted. ‘We’d all love to have you with us again, and if you’re having second thoughts – ’

‘Only kidding,’ Leonie said hurriedly. ‘I’m looking forward to it, honest. I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt. I can’t wait to buy some marvellous Egyptian jewellery,’ she added with genuine enthusiasm. Her collection of exotic costume jewellery took up most of her crowded dressing table already, filigree earrings tangled up with jangling metal Thai necklaces, most of it purchased in ethnic shops in Dublin and London instead of in their original, far-flung homelands.

‘Watch those souks and markets though,’ warned Anita, a distrustful traveller who believed that anywhere beyond the English Channel was off the beaten track. ‘They love big women in the East, you know.’

‘Oooh, goodie,’ growled Leonie, instinctively reverting to the Leonie Delaney: wild, sexy, earth goddess image she’d been projecting for years. If Anita guessed that the image was all fake and that most of Leonie’s hot dates were at home with the remote control and a carton of strawberry shortcake ice cream, she never said anything.

After a few more minutes’ chat where Leonie promised to enjoy herself, she hung up, privately thinking that if any white-slave trader wanted to whisk her away to a life of sexual servitude, he’d have to be bloody strong. At five eight and fifteen stone, she was hardly dancing harem girl material and was powerful enough to flatten the most ardent Egyptian bottom-pincher.

Anita was sweet to say it, she thought later, examining the effect of her saffron Indian skirt worn with her favourite black silk shirt and a coiled necklace of tiny amber beads. Black wasn’t really suitable for travelling to a hot country, she knew that, but she felt so much more comfortable wearing it. Nothing could hide her size, Leonie knew, but black camouflaged it.

Rich colours suited her and she loved to wear them: flowing tunics of opulent crimsons, voluminous capes in soft purple velvet and ankle-length skirts decorated with Indian mirrors and elaborate embroidery in vibrant shades. Like an aristocratic fortune-teller or a showily elegant actress from thirties Broadway, Leonie’s style of dressing could never be ignored. But black was still her favourite. Safe and familiar. As satisfied as she’d ever be with her reflection, she started on her face, applying the heavy panstick make-up expertly.

If she hadn’t been a veterinary nurse, Leonie would have loved to have been a make-up artist. She hadn’t been blessed with a pretty face, but when she’d worked her magic with her pencils and her brushes and her eyes were hypnotically ringed with deep kohl, she felt she looked mysterious and exotic. Like the girl in those old Turkish Delight adverts who sat waiting in the dunes for her sheikh. Certainly not too big, too old and too scared of a lonely, manless future.

Her mouth was a lovely cupid’s bow that would have looked fabulous on some petite size-eight model but seemed slightly incongruous on a tall solid woman. ‘A fine hoult of a woman,’ as one of the old men who brought his sheepdog into the vet’s used to call her admiringly.

Her face was rounded with cheekbones she adored because, no matter how fat she got, they stayed defiantly obvious, saving her face from descending into plumpness. Her hair, naturally rat-coloured as she always said, was golden from home dyeing because she couldn’t really afford to have it done professionally any more.

But Leonie’s most beautiful features were her eyes. Huge, naturally dark-lashed, they were the same stunning aquamarine as the Adriatic and looked too blue to be real.

‘Your eyes make you beautiful,’ her mother would say encouragingly when she was growing up. ‘You don’t need to speak, Leonie, your eyes do it for you.’

Her mother’s attitude had always been that you were whatever you wanted to be. Glamorous herself, Claire told her daughter that stunning looks came from the inside.

Unfortunately, Leonie had decided at the age of nineteen that her mother was wrong and that lovely eyes weren’t enough to make her the beautiful woman she longed to be, a Catherine Deneuve lookalike. This realization had come about when she went to college after years of being educated in the closeted female environment of the convent school. At University College Dublin, she discovered men for the first time. And also discovered that the ones she fancied in biology lectures were much more keen on her less intelligent but smaller classmates. Her long-distance paramours asked Leonie if she’d join in their Rag Week mixed tug-of-war team, and asked other girls to go to the Rag Ball with them.

Miserably, she concluded that she was nothing more than a plain, fat girl. Which was why she’d decided to reinvent herself. Leonie Murray, shy girl who was always at the back at school photographs, had become the splendidly eccentric Leonie, lover of unusual clothes, wacky jewellery and plenty of war paint applied as if she was ready for her close up, Mr De Mille. As she was physically larger than life, Leonie decided to become literally larger than life. Vivacious, lively and great fun, she was invited to all the best parties but never asked to go outside for a snog on the terrace.

Her first and only true love, Ray, had seen beneath the layer of Max Factor panstick to see the deeply insecure woman she really was. But she and Ray just weren’t meant to be. Their marriage had been a mistake. She’d been grateful to be rescued from loneliness, and being grateful was no reason to get married, as she knew now. Neither was being pregnant. Sometimes she felt guilty because she’d married him for all the wrong reasons and then she’d ended it, after ten years of marriage.

They’d been opposites, she and Ray. He was a quiet arts student who’d never gone to wild parties and who spent every spare minute in the library. Leonie had been the grande dame of first-year science. While Ray was reading Rousseau, Leonie was reading the riot act to the impertinent agricultural student who’d teased her about her heavy make-up. (She’d cried over that later but, at the time, she’d been magnificent.)

They met at a screening of Annie Hall and ended up spending the evening together laughing at Woody Allen’s humour. In the later years of their marriage, Leonie realized that a sense of humour and a love of Woody Allen movies was one of the few things they’d actually shared. Otherwise, they were poles apart. Ray liked non-fiction, political discussions and avoiding parties. Leonie loved going out, disco dancing, and reading potboilers with a glass of wine and a Cadbury’s Flake in her hand. It wouldn’t have lasted but for advance warning that baby Danny was coming in seven months. They got married quickly and were blissfully happy until the honeymoon wore off and they discovered just how unsuited they really were.

It was a testimony to something, Leonie always thought, that they went through another ten years of being civilized and kind to each other, even though there were more sparks in the fridge than there were in their relationship. She’d lived with the knowledge for a long time, enduring it and the barrenness that was her marriage for the sake of Danny, Melanie and Abigail. But finally, something had snapped in Leonie and she knew she had to get out. She felt suffocated, as if she was slowly dying and wasting her life at the same time. There had to be more, she knew it.

She didn’t know how she found the courage to sit Ray down and ask him what he thought about them splitting up. ‘I love you, Ray, but we’re both trapped,’ she’d said, given Dutch courage by two hot ports. ‘We’re like brother and sister, not husband and wife. One day, you’ll meet someone or I’ll meet someone and then this will turn into a nuclear war of retribution, you fighting me and vice versa. We’ll hate each other and we’ll destroy the kids. Do you want that? Shouldn’t we both be honest about this instead of kidding each other?’

It had been a tough time. Ray had insisted that he was happy, that their way of muddling along suited him. ‘I’m not a romantic like you, Leonie, I don’t expect great love or anything,’ he’d said sorrowfully. ‘We’re happy enough, aren’t we?’

Once the doubts were out in the open, it was as if the wound couldn’t heal. Gradually, Ray and Leonie drifted apart until, finally, he had said she was right, it was a half-marriage. He’d shocked her by how quickly he found another life, but she was too busy trying to explain things to three uncomprehending children to think about it. Away from her, he’d blossomed. He had scores of friends, went on interesting holidays and changed jobs. He went on dates, bought trendy clothes and introduced the kids to his girlfriends. Leonie had worked hard, looked after the kids and hoped that Mr Right knew he could safely step into her world now that she was a single woman again. So far, zilch.

As she told Penny sometimes: ‘I should have stayed married and had affairs. That was the right way to do it! True love and romance with a safety net. Trust me to get it wrong trying to do it right.’

She and Ray were still the best of friends and he was a good father.

Now the only people who saw Leonie as she really was were her three children.

With them, she only wore two coats of mascara and a bit of lipstick and they were allowed to see her in her dressing gown. God, she missed them.

Determined not to blub over the kids again, Leonie thought of how she’d always wanted to visit magical Egypt. Fear of flying was no reason to cry off. For a start, she couldn’t afford to waste the money the holiday had cost her and, secondly, when did Leonie Delaney balk at anything? She got out her eyeliner brush and fiercely painted on a thick line of dusky kohl that’d have made Cleopatra proud.

How could you jump-start your life if you quailed at the very first fence – a holiday on your own?

CHAPTER FOUR

Four hours later, Leonie stood in the queue at the airport clutching her guide book to her chest and wishing the plane journey was over. Ever since she’d seen that disaster movie about the guys in the Peruvian mountains who’d had to resort to cannibalism to survive after a plane crash, she’d hated flying. Loathed it.

‘I’ll give you some ketamine for the trip,’ joked Angie the previous day, referring to the heavy-duty animal tranquillizer.

‘I’d almost take it,’ Leonie had replied, not joking. She’d bought a bottle of herbal relaxant tablets, her travel sickness wrist-bands and some aromatherapy oil to rub on her temples, but she still felt more stressed than Mrs Reilly’s hyperactive cat when it was getting its claws clipped. A lovely, sweet animal in the home – or so Mrs Reilly regularly assured them immediately after Sootie had mauled somebody – the five-year-old tabby was labelled ‘dangerous’ in the surgery. Heavy gloves and sedation were required to calm Sootie before even the simplest job. Leonie wished that cabin crew sedated their patients.

She pushed her trolley further along the queue and looked at the other passengers taking Flight MS634 to Luxor. Nobody else appeared to be sweating with fear. Especially not the very slim woman at the front of the queue who had the nervous expression of a purebred Saluki hound. Long, silky, light brown hair that fell over her big saucer-like eyes added to the effect. In an unflattering cream knit outfit, she looked terribly thin and unhappy. She must have been about thirty, Leonie guessed, but she carried herself with the unease of a teenager going on a hated family holiday when she longed to be at home.

An older woman, obviously her mother, stood beside her talking animatedly. The older woman was wearing a very old-fashioned floral dress, the sort of thing Leonie’s rather Bohemian mother would have refused to wear years ago because she might have to wear gloves or a pill-box hat with it. A giant of a man with a beard appeared beside them and started arguing with the girl behind the airline counter, his booming voice easily audible along the length of the queue as he roared.

‘I’d make a complaint to you, young lady, but I don’t see the point,’ he thundered at the airline girl. ‘I’ve made my feelings more than plain to the travel people. You mark my words, they won’t be taking advantage of me.’

The Saluki Woman looked away, eyes wide with embarrassment, and caught sight of Leonie gazing at her. Abashed, Leonie looked down at her trolley. She loved people-watching but hated being caught. Figuring out what they did and what sort of people they were from peering into their trolleys in the supermarket was her favourite hobby, and she couldn’t sit on the train into Dublin for longer than five minutes without speculating on the relationship between the passengers sitting opposite her. Were they married, going out, about to break up? Did the woman with a trolley full of Häagen-Dazs chocolate chip but a figure like Kate Moss actually eat any of the ice cream or did she have a fat portrait of herself in the attic?

Up ahead, the woman at the desk said ‘Next’ with a relieved voice. When the difficult trio finally walked back down the queue after checking in, Leonie kept her eyes averted but risked a surreptitious glance at the younger woman.

As she walked past, carefully stowing her travel documents into a sleek little handbag that wouldn’t have held a quarter of Leonie’s cosmetic junk, Leonie noticed that the Saluki Woman had pink varnished nails which had been bitten down to the stubs. She looked resolutely ahead, as if she knew the entire queue had heard the argument and was terrified of making eye contact with anyone. Definitely not keen on holidaying with the parents, Leonie decided.

The queue shuffled forward and, with nobody interesting to gaze at, Leonie toyed with the idea of skipping off and driving home. Nobody would have to know: well, her mother would, because that would be her first port of call, to take her beloved Penny and the animals home. But nobody else had to know.

Meaning Anita. Safely on the way to West Cork, Anita wouldn’t be in Wicklow for another three weeks and would remain oblivious that her flamboyant, outwardly dauntless, divorced forty-two-year-old friend had cried off from her first single holiday ever because of fear of flying.

‘I’m going to the loo. I won’t be long,’ said a soft female voice behind her.

‘I’ll miss you,’ answered a male voice.

‘Oh,’ sighed the woman. ‘I love you.’

‘Love you too,’ answered the man.

Newlyweds, Leonie realized wistfully.

She pretended to look around her in boredom and got a glimpse of a young couple kissing gently before the woman, wearing a virginal pale pink short cotton dress that wasn’t exactly suitable for travelling in, hurried off in the direction of the toilets, looking back at her husband all the time, giving him sweet little waves and smiling with sheer joy.

He smiled back at her, one hand holding two suitcases on which some joker had written ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’ in sprawling white Tipp-Ex letters.

Had she ever been that happy and that much in love, Leonie wondered, turning back and gazing blankly at the rest of the queue. She didn’t think so. Surely she deserved it. Wasn’t there someone out there for her, someone who couldn’t bear to let her off to the loo without kissing her goodbye and telling her to be careful? There must be. And she wouldn’t find him sitting at home weeding the garden. She gave her trolley a determined shove along the slowly diminishing queue. Egypt here we come.

They’d put her in 56C, a window seat at the back of the plane. Leonie winced as she sat down in it and looked longingly at the two empty seats beside her. If only she could swap with one of the other people. But what if they didn’t want to move? Hating herself for being so nervous, Leonie peered down the aisle and looked for a stewardess she could accost and ask about changing seats. Instead, she saw a graceful woman striding towards her, confident and slim in jeans and a white T-shirt with a navy cotton cardigan slung casually over her shoulders.

She held her small holdall aloft so she wouldn’t bump into anything, but when she collided with a large man shoving a bag into the overhead locker, the woman gave him a dazzling smile, flicked back her long nutbrown hair, and strode on. The man’s eyes followed her, taking in the gentle sway of her slim hips and long, long legs. She was aware of his gaze, Leonie was sure of it, from the small smile that tilted up the corners of her full mouth as she progressed up the plane. She looked perfectly elegant and brimming with confidence, the sort of woman who was born to go on a Nile cruise, from the tips of her spotlessly clean deck shoes to the designer sunglasses perched on top of her head. When Leonie stuck her sunglasses on her head, they inevitably fell off.

The woman reached row 56 and smiled in a friendly manner at Leonie, who decided to take the bull by the horns.

‘I did ask not to get a window seat,’ she gasped up at the glamorous brunette, fear at having to look out the window overcoming her hatred of being a nuisance.

‘You can have mine,’ the woman said in a gentle voice with just a hint of a West of Ireland accent. ‘I hate the middle seat.’

They swapped and Leonie smelled a heady waft of Obsession perfume as the woman arranged herself in the window seat, put on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, took a very serious-looking guide book from her small bag and settled back to read it. No wedding ring, Leonie noticed. Perhaps she was travelling alone too and they could team up. Leonie felt very grateful to be sitting beside this nice woman. Everything was going to work out.

She tried to relax and peered out of the window from the comfort of the middle seat. She could see the baggage handlers hoisting giant suitcases on to the conveyor belt to the plane’s hold.

Practically everyone was on board before anyone arrived at the seats in front of them. Leonie, by now bored looking at the baggage handlers because she could imagine them shaking all her clothes and make-up to bits, watched the late arrivals. The family she’d observed earlier were marching up the aisle towards her. The younger woman came first, her too-long fringe and her downcast eyes ensuring she didn’t meet anyone’s gaze as she shoved a small rucksack into the overhead bin and sank quickly into the window seat. Behind her came the other pair. Leonie grimaced. From the performance she’d seen at the check-in desk, she could imagine the fun and games they’d have on the flight with Mr Conviviality himself.

‘Number 55B,’ muttered the older woman. ‘There we are. Maybe I should sit on the window seat.’

Silently, the girl got up and let her mother into the seat. She appeared to be waiting to see if her father wanted to sit beside her mother.

‘Get in, Emma,’ snapped the big man impatiently.

‘Sorry,’ the girl murmured, ‘I just thought…’

‘Do you want me to put your bag up, Anne-Marie?’ he interrupted her rudely.

‘No, well, let me see,’ began the older woman, ‘I’ll want my glasses and my tablets and…’

Leonie looked out the window again. Family life, what a pain. When she was that age, she wouldn’t have gone on holiday with her mother and father for all the tea in China. That girl must be mad – or simple.

When the plane finally took off, Leonie closed her eyes with terror; Hannah closed her eyes and grinned at the memory of Jeff’s powerful lovemaking, which was certainly as uplifting as the thrust of a jumbo; and Emma sucked a mint, feeling calmer because of the half a Valium she’d taken in the loo beforehand. She tried to get comfortable but it was hard because her father was taking up a huge amount of space on purpose.

Half a Valium couldn’t harm the baby, she hoped, but her father was in a terrible mood and was determined to make everyone else suffer too. Emma had seen several people watching them in the queue when he’d argued furiously with the poor check-in girl over not being able to smoke his pipe on the flight. It was going to be a hellish holiday if he behaved like that the whole time. Why, oh why had she come?

Hannah sank gratefully on to a seat in the air-conditioned bus and decided that the only way she’d ever be cool in Luxor was if she went around naked with a bag of ice strapped to her body. It was half six in the evening and she was roasting after just fifteen minutes outside the airport. She’d have escaped to the cool of the Incredible Egypt tour bus more quickly had it not been for the two porters in Arab dress who fought volubly over who got to haul her suitcase over to the bus.

‘Great double act, guys,’ she grinned at them, giving them each a tip.

It must be eighty degrees at least and it was nearly pitch-dark. Who knew how hot it’d be during the day. She fanned herself with the itinerary the tour guide had handed out as she greeted her party of thirty-two travellers.

‘Make your way to the bus and I’ll finish rounding our gang up,’ the tour guide had said brightly as she pointed people in the direction of the buses waiting like gleaming silver monsters in the shimmering heat.

Fresh as a daisy in a royal blue cotton blouse and cream shorts, the tour guide was a young woman named Flora who exuded calm efficiency. She’d need to be calm to deal with that horrible man who’d sat in the row ahead on the plane, Hannah thought. He’d complained throughout the journey, saying the meal was cold when it should have been hot and demanding to know if they’d get a refund for taking off an hour late. What a bully, she thought with disgust.

He’d been rude as hell to the sweet, dark-eyed stewardess who’d haltingly told him they didn’t serve any sort of alcohol on the flight, and during the scramble for visas in the arrivals hall in Luxor, only the deaf would have been spared his sarcastic comments about Egyptian inefficiency.

‘Call this an airport?’ he’d roared when the crowds from the plane began milling around the arrivals hall, looking for their tour guides, trying to change money and queueing for visas in disorganized groups. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace asking Westerners to come into this sort of makeshift place. No signs, no authority, no proper air conditioning, nothing! No wonder these fellas were ruled by foreign powers for so long – couldn’t arrange a piss-up in a brewery, if you ask me. I’ll tell you, I’ll be writing a letter to the Irish Times and the Egyptian embassy when I get back.’

Hannah couldn’t figure out why he’d bothered coming to a foreign country if all he was going to do was whinge about the heat and make racist and jingoistic comments about the inhabitants.

Taking a gulp from her bottle of mineral water, she watched sweating people haul themselves up the bus steps, panting heavily and repeating ‘It’s hot!’ to each other every few minutes.

‘It’s hot,’ gasped her large blonde next-door neighbour from the plane as she shoved her canvas holdall into the luggage rack and flopped heavily on to the seat beside Hannah.

‘That’s what we get for not listening to the travel agent who warned it was unbearably hot in August,’ Hannah said with a grin.

‘Did they say that?’ The woman rummaged around in a bulging black suede handbag until she triumphantly extracted a small orange juice carton. She stuck the tiny plastic straw in, drank deeply and then said: ‘Mine never mentioned the heat. I just said I could only travel in August and they booked it for me. My kids are away for August, you see. I’m Leonie,’ she added.

‘Nice to meet you. I’m Hannah.’

Leonie knew her face was pinker than usual, while her shaggy blonde hair was frizzing in the Gas Mark 7 dry heat. On the plane, Leonie had barely talked to her neighbour at all because she’d been desperately trying to concentrate on reading a thriller for the whole flight, hoping that she’d forget the fact that she was on a plane at all if she could immerse herself in a book. Safely on terra firma, she was all talk, loquacious with relief. Hannah didn’t look hot at all: she looked as if she was used to the sort of temperatures that could cook a chicken out of doors.

‘Wasn’t it mad in there,’ Leonie said, referring to the arrivals hall. ‘These men kept taking my case and trying to stick it on their trolley and I kept having to take it back. I think I ruptured something dragging it off the last time.’ She massaged her shoulder.

‘They’re porters and they’re hoping for a tip if they bring your luggage out for you,’ Hannah explained.

‘Oh. I never thought of that. But I’ve no Egyptian money yet,’ Leonie pointed out. ‘I’m going to change currencies on the boat.’

She began fiddling around in her bag to check for her purse, giving Hannah an opportunity to study her. Leonie’s uptilted nose was strangely childlike, Hannah decided, and her make-up was a bit heavy for the torrid heat of North Africa. But nothing could hide the vibrancy of Leonie’s lively, animated face, which displayed a thousand emotions as she spoke. She wasn’t pretty but there was such warmth in her expression that it made her strangely attractive. And her eyes were the most amazing blue, glittering like Ceylon sapphires. Hannah had never seen anybody with such piercingly blue eyes apart from models in glossy magazines advertising coloured contact lenses. Leonie’s eyes could have been the result of coloured contact lenses, of course, but Hannah bet her life they weren’t. If only she wasn’t wearing all that panstick foundation and the heavy eyeliner. It was like stage make-up, a façade behind which she was trying to hide. Hannah smiled to herself. Everyone hid something. She’d been successfully hiding her lack of education for years.

‘It’d be lovely if we could have dinner together, maybe,’ Leonie was saying, hating herself for chattering away like a blackbird on acid. Terrified at the idea of being away on her own without a single friendly face to talk to, she was thrilled that she’d identified a fellow solo female traveller. But she didn’t want to come across as too lonely or too needy: Hannah, who seemed very self-possessed and assured, might not want a holiday companion. ‘If you don’t mind having dinner with me, that is…’ Leonie said, her voice fading.

‘Course not,’ said Hannah, who was perfectly happy on her own but felt oddly protective about the other woman, who was probably five nine in her socks and at least twice Hannah’s size. ‘It’s lovely to have company and we’ll be much safer from exotic, handsome Egyptians if we’re together. Or is it the male population who should be frightened of us?’ she joked.

Leonie laughed and looked ruefully at her sturdy body. ‘I think I’m quite safe enough and the male population needn’t worry.’ For once, she hadn’t felt the need to make some crack about men and how she couldn’t live without them. Those stupid remarks were only ever covering up her insecurities and she cringed hearing herself say them. Today, she hadn’t felt the need to pretend. Hannah was nice, calming. It’d be lovely sharing the holiday with her.

The bad-tempered bearded man, his wife and daughter got on the bus and plonked themselves at the front. Hannah and Leonie watched the trio with interest as the father kept up a critical monologue while his wife fanned herself weakly with a ridiculously out of place Spanish fan. Her long fair hair held back from her forehead was rather girlish for a woman of her age, as if she was acting the ingénue, while her tight-waisted, wide-skirted dress made her look vaguely as if she’d entered a fancy dress competition. She looked displeased, as if Egypt had been examined briefly and found seriously wanting. The daughter sat silently in the seat behind them, her face pale and her expression distant.

‘I hope to God we don’t end up with cabins anywhere near them,’ Leonie whispered fervently. ‘They look like the sort of people who complain if they don’t have something to complain about.’

‘The father certainly does,’ Hannah agreed, ‘but the person I feel sorry for is the daughter. Imagine being stuck with a loudmouthed tyrant like that.’

Watching the younger woman’s taut little face, Hannah was convinced it was sheer embarrassment at her father’s behaviour that made her look so distant. ‘She looks as if she’s going to cry any minute. Maybe we should get her to sit with us,’ Hannah suggested, overcome with a desire to save another lame dog, now she’d already saved one.

Leonie winced. ‘I’m not so sure…’ she said. ‘What if the other pair insist on making friends with us too and we get stuck with the lot of them for the entire cruise?’

‘Leonie,’ reproved Hannah, ‘you’ve got to live a little, experiment. Anyway, we’ll all end up sitting at tables of six or eight for meals on the boat, so if we’re allocated one with them, we’re stuck anyway.’

It was dark as the bus drove through the streets of Luxor on its way to the boat. Flora sat at the front, pointing out sights and welcoming them all to Egypt.

‘You’ll have a busy week,’ she explained, ‘because many of the tours start very early in the morning. We make early starts because the temples and sights get very busy with busloads of tourists during the day, and also because it’s cooler to sightsee in the early morning. But tomorrow you can have a lie-in as the boat sails to Edfu for the first visit which is after lunch. We’ll have a welcome meeting in the bar tonight at –’ she consulted her watch ‘ – half eight, which is in an hour, and I’ll go through the itinerary. Dinner is at nine.’

Hannah and Leonie peered out the window at the darkened, dusty streets, gazing at the one- and two-storey mudbrick dwellings which looked so different from anything at home. Many looked unfinished, as if another storey was to be built but everyone had lost interest. Scattered among these rural homes were palm trees and, far away from the road, luxuriant green crops could be seen growing several feet tall.

As they drove nearer to the lights of Luxor, Leonie noticed a solitary donkey leaning against a shed roofed with straw. He looked very thin, Leonie thought with a pang of pity. She could see his ribs sticking out painfully. She hoped she wouldn’t see animals being treated cruelly: it was bad enough at home seeing homeless dogs brought into the surgery after being hit by cars. At least she could do something for them at home, but here, she wasn’t a veterinary nurse: she was just a tourist.

A vision of Penny came to her, suddenly; those melting chocolate eyes filled with abject misery at being left behind. Leonie missed her desperately; she missed all the animals she loved. Poor Clover locked away in the cattery, and little Herman, watched endlessly by her mother’s ravenous cats. And she felt so far away from the kids. At least Ireland was nearer to Boston than here. Just a phone call away. Egypt was two continents away and she’d be travelling so they’d never be able to track her down. What if something happened and Ray couldn’t reach her and…

Stop it, she commanded. Nothing’s going to happen. Trying to put portents of gloom out of her mind, Leonie stared out the windows as the countryside gave way to straggly city streets with more traffic. Dust rose up into the air from the other vehicles on the road: battered Ladas with TAXI signs on them and stately old station wagons in bright colours, encrusted with dust. Electric signs in exotic Arabic shone over small shops and cafés, with bright English-language signs over the myriad souvenir shops.

Every few yards, she could see small groups of men sitting outside their houses, drinking coffee or watching football on television. Most wore the long simple cotton robes with white head-dresses tied into a neat hat. Young boys sat nearby, staring and pointing at the tourists in the bus, some waving excitedly.

‘I haven’t seen any women,’ Leonie whispered to Hannah, as if the men watching them from the roadside might read their lips.

‘I know,’ Hannah whispered back. ‘It does seem to be a very male-orientated society. There were no women at the airport either. It’s a mainly Muslim country, though, isn’t it? And that means the women dress modestly.’

Hannah thought ruefully of her holiday wardrobe, which contained quite a few skimpy clothes for sunbathing on the boat. As the guide books mentioned that women shouldn’t wear revealing shorts or sleeveless outfits for visiting temples, she’d brought plenty of cover-up clothes as well. But if the Egyptians frowned upon Western dress, her bikini would be staying in her suitcase. She didn’t want to offend people with her clothes. Mind you, she realized with a grin, the elderly parish priest back home in Connemara wouldn’t appreciate a pale pink crochet bikini any more than a religious Egyptian.

‘On your right is the Nile,’ Flora announced and the passengers craned their necks for their first sight of the great river. At first, Hannah couldn’t see anything but other people’s heads as everyone tried to get a glimpse out of the window.

Then she saw it, a great expanse of gleaming water, sparkling with lights from the large river boats that were moored by its banks. The mystical Nile, the gift of Egypt as Herodotus said – or was it the other way round? She couldn’t remember. Egyptian kings and queens had sailed up and down this river in their royal barges, pharaohs sailing to visit their temples and to worship their gods. Tutankhamun, Rameses, Hatshepsut: their names were a roll call of an exotic past world…

‘Look at the boats,’ breathed Leonie, who was dying to know on what sort of vessel they’d be spending the next seven days and who couldn’t concentrate on the glories of the Nile until she saw her cabin to see if it had enough room for her vast suitcase. ‘That’s a huge one,’ she added as they drew closer to a floating palace decorated with hundreds of fairy lights. ‘I hope that’s our boat.’

The bus sped past. ‘Oh well…’ Leonie shrugged.

The bus suddenly shuddered to a halt beside a much smaller boat which was painted French blue and had the words Queen Tiye written on the side in huge gold letters. Three decks high, the top deck was half covered with a large canvas awning, the other half open to the skies with wicker seats and sun loungers splayed around. The top deck shone with lots of small lights and they could see a few people sitting around a table, bottles and glasses in front of them. ‘Pretty, pretty,’ Leonie sighed happily.

Everyone trooped off the bus, identified their luggage for the porters as Flora commanded them, and then climbed carefully down the stone steps at the quay to walk along the narrow wood-and-rope bridge on to the boat.

Leonie held on to the ropes at the side of the bridge to balance herself and beamed back at Hannah who was behind her: ‘It’s very Indiana Jones,’ she said, thrilled with the adventure. ‘Is this the gangplank, do you think?’

‘Dunno,’ answered Hannah tiredly. She was beginning to feel the after-effects of her sleepless night with the energetic Jeff. All she wanted now was to fall into her bed and sleep until morning. But she shouldn’t really skip the talk with Flora. Otherwise, she might miss out on what was happening for the voyage – and Hannah couldn’t bear the thought of missing out on information. You could never rely on other people to tell you things.

When everyone had filled in a registration card, Flora organized cabin keys. Hannah and Leonie’s cabins were opposite each other.

‘Isn’t this fun?’ Leonie asked in childish delight as the two of them walked down a narrow passage to their cabins. She’d never been on a boat like this before.

The big ferries to France were different. Modern and boring. This was all so different, so exotic. The walls were covered in rich dark wood and hung with tiny prints of Victorian watercolour desert scenes offset by filigree gold frames. Even the cabin keys were decorated with little brass pyramids. Leonie wished the kids were here with her to experience it all. Mel would be thrilled at the thought of buying silky Egyptian scarves, Abby would be in raptures at the thought of seeing the temples, and Danny would be pestering the crew to let him steer the ship. She hoped they were having a good holiday.

She opened her cabin door in a fizz of excitement which quickly abated when she saw the room which was to be her home for the next week. The cabin was tiny, not even as big as her bathroom back in the cottage. There were none of the filigree gold paintings or rich wood of the rest of the boat: the cabin was painted plain cream all over with yellow curtains and yellow-striped covers on the two single beds.

A six-inch square ledge served as a dressing table, with another as a bedside table between the beds. There was a small fridge beside the wardrobe, which was really just a niche in the wall with doors. Leonie stuck her head inside the bathroom to find a minuscule room with a sink, toilet and a shower. Her suitcase would barely fit in the cabin, never mind trying to cram her vast store of clothes into the wardrobe, and as for dressing table space – she’d obviously have to use the other bed to lay her make-up and jewellery out.

‘Compact, huh?’ Hannah put her head round the door.

‘Compact is not the word. It’s just as well I haven’t brought my toyboy lover for a week of passionate thrashing around on the Nile.’ Leonie grinned. ‘We’d concuss ourselves every time we launched off the dressing table on to the bed!’

‘Lucky you with a toyboy,’ joked Hannah. ‘We must compare stories later.’ She disappeared as the porter brought her case along the corridor.

My side of that conversation won’t take long, Leonie thought regretfully.

She opened the curtains and let the quayside lights shine into the cabin. Opening the window, she looked down to see the placid dark waters of the Nile. She was really here, she realized with a happy shiver. She hadn’t balked with fear and run home; she’d taken her first holiday on her own. That had to be worth something in the independence stakes.

Once unpacked, she showered quickly, thrilled at the fact that the compact shower room had only a tiny mirror so she didn’t have to stare at her huge, pinky-white naked self. She spent the usual ten minutes trying on clothes, then ripping them off and throwing them on the bed when she looked awful in the long wardrobe mirror.

Her burgundy velvet embroidered dress was too hot even if it was the nicest thing she’d brought and her other dress, the sleeveless black one, revealed so much of her plump arms she couldn’t bear it. Hannah would not be having this problem, she sighed, thinking of what a fantastic figure her new friend had. Slim and elegant, Hannah had looked wonderful in her simple travelling clothes. Leonie would have killed to look that good in jeans.

Eventually, she settled on the sleeveless dress worn with an open pink silk shirt, the long tail covering up her bum, she hoped. She left the cabin full of anticipation for the night ahead.

The informal meeting before dinner in the top-deck bar was in half an hour but Leonie decided to go up now, so she could daydream quietly and watch the world go by.

In her daydreams, she had a vision of herself sitting on the upper deck, glass of wine in hand and a swarm of admiring men surrounding her like something from Scott Fitzgerald. Instead, she caught sight of herself in the smoky mirrors which lined the stairs and saw the familiar reflection: the solid peasant’s body and a mass of hair like untamed hay that no anti-frizz serum could help.

Scott Fitzgerald’s heroes would probably hand her their empty martini glasses and ask for refills, presuming she was the serving girl.

Wishing she’d stuck to a diet for her holidays, she stomped upstairs to the bar. Decorated in ornate carved wood, it was certainly from another era with its Art Deco furniture and French lithographs behind the counter.

She ordered a glass of white wine from the smiling, dark-eyed young barman and, once she’d signed her room number on the bill, took her glass outside to the bar-level deck where she could feel the night air on her skin and listen to the noises of the river.

There was nobody else there and she breathed in the silence broken only by a distant hum of Arab music from one end of the boat. It was still gloriously warm and Leonie felt herself relax finally as she stared out over the tranquil darkness of the Nile. She wasn’t going to obsess about being forty-something and manless: she was going to enjoy herself.

Moored to the other bank, she could see the tall sails of river boats. Feluccas, her guide book had explained. You could rent one and sail down the river for a couple of hours, travelling the way people had for thousands of years. How romantic.

She picked up her glass and was about to take a sip when she heard a hesitant, rather husky voice through the vast open doors order a mineral water with no ice.

Leonie smiled to herself and played one of her favourite games: guessing to whom the voice belonged. She thought of the couple of sedate blue-rinsed ladies who’d climbed on to the coach last of all, twittering with relief that one of their bags hadn’t been gobbled up by the carousel but had in fact been rescued from the wrong baggage cart by an apologetic airport official. Definitely one of them. Although that voice was very sexy, very whiskey and cigarettes as it said, ‘Thank you so much,’ in an anxious manner. Too sexy to be a genteel seventy-year-old, unless she’d had a lifetime of fierce chain-smoking behind her.

Twisting in her seat to see if she was right, Leonie was astonished to see that the owner of the voice was the anxious Saluki Woman with the parents from hell, still wearing her long cream outfit and still looking immaculate. But she looked different somehow.

Instead of her previously distant expression, the woman’s face was tired and, no, Leonie wasn’t imagining it, friendly. She even carried herself differently: her body was no longer tense and she gazed around as if some weight had been lifted from her. Before, she’d avoided eye contact like the plague. Now, she looked around, spotted Leonie and gave a half-smile that seemed almost apologetic.

Leonie, naturally friendly, smiled back and immediately regretted it. What if the woman and her awful family decided to sit with her and Hannah during dinner? Or attach themselves to them for the entire cruise? What a terrifying thought. Hannah was mad to think about it. Wishing she didn’t feel such a bitch, Leonie wiped the smile from her face just as abruptly and went back to studying the Nile as if she was about to sit an exam on What Sort of Objects You Might Find Floating By on a Summer’s Evening.

‘You look as if someone just pinched your bottom,’ remarked Hannah, sitting in the chair opposite and placing a glass of orange juice on the table. ‘Or is it because they haven’t pinched your bottom you look so glum?’ In loose white drawstring trousers and a simple caramel fitted T-shirt, she looked classy and comfortable at the same time. Leonie immediately felt overdressed in her floating pink silk.

‘I’m avoiding looking at yer woman in case Ma and Pa Walton decide to join us,’ Leonie explained in a whisper. ‘She smiled at me when she came in and I’m terrified of starting up a friendship I won’t be able to shake off. I can’t stand people like her father. I never lose my temper except with people like him and then I’m like a bomb, I just explode.’

‘I’d love to see you explode at him. Anyway, the poor girl’s lonely,’ Hannah insisted.

‘I collect enough lame dogs at home without collecting a few rabid ones abroad,’ Leonie groaned, knowing that Hannah was right. The poor girl was lonely and it wasn’t fair to ostracize her just because of the people she was travelling with.

They both sneaked casual glances at the woman, who had positioned herself at a table just outside the bar and was trying to take something from her handbag without anyone noticing. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, Hannah decided, and she looked thoroughly miserable, like a cat that had been locked out in the rain. The girl had a long face, Leonie was right about that. But having long straight hair trailing down her face didn’t help. Hannah suspected that some unkind person had once told her that wearing your fringe low detracted from a large nose. Probably that obnoxious father of hers. Hannah bet that if the girl smiled or if she wore something less colourless than that hideously old-fashioned cream thing, she’d be pretty in an understated way.

‘Let’s ask her over for a drink,’ she said now. ‘We’re asking her, not Ma and Pa as well,’ she added. After all, she thought silently, if she was befriending one lonely soul on this holiday where she’d planned for total solitude, she may as well befriend another. ‘I promise you, Leonie, if her father wants to sit with us and they drive us mad, I’ll get rid of them!’

Leonie laughed. ‘If he annoys me, don’t worry, I’ll do the honours.’

Hannah walked gracefully over to the other girl’s table, Leonie watching her new friend enviously. Hannah was so slim and God! so sexy. Leonie would have given five years of her life to look like Hannah for just one night.

‘Hello, I’m Hannah Campbell. Since you’re on your own, would you like to have a drink with us?’

The girl’s face creased into a pleased smile.

Hannah loved being right: the girl was pretty when she smiled. She had a sweet, shy smile and her eyes were a lovely smoky blue colour fringed with fair lashes. If only she’d do something with that hair.

‘I’d love to,’ Emma said in her hesitant, throaty voice. ‘I always feel so self-conscious sitting on my own with a drink. I’m Emma, by the way. Emma Sheridan.’

Carrying her drink, she followed Hannah over to the table and held her hand out to Leonie.

‘Emma Sheridan,’ she said formally.

Leonie grinned. ‘Leonie Delaney,’ she replied.

‘Do you mind me joining you?’ Emma asked.

‘Thrilled,’ Leonie said.

‘Right.’ Hannah decided she needed to do something to liven things up. ‘We all need a drink. What do you want, girls?’

‘I’ve loads of mineral water left,’ Emma said, holding up her glass.

‘Nonsense,’ Hannah said briskly. ‘You need a proper drink.’

The other woman’s expression faltered. ‘I shouldn’t, really. My father, you know…’ she hesitated, catching herself just in time. Imagine telling these two women that she wasn’t going to have a drink because her father disapproved of women drinking more than a sherry and she couldn’t face his disapproval. They’d think she was a complete nutcase. ‘My father says the beer here is supposed to be very strong.’

‘A glass of wine won’t kill you.’

Something fell to the floor and Hannah picked it up. It was a small bottle of Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy, the herbal antidote to stress. You took four drops on your tongue to calm your nerves, she knew, having consumed enough of it when she was recovering from Harry’s round-the-world bombshell.

Emma gave her a wry look. ‘Travelling makes me stressed,’ she said bluntly. She left out the words ‘travelling with my father…’

Hannah handed the bottle back. ‘Well, you definitely need one drink then.’

Leonie pronounced her white wine unusual but drinkable, so that was that. The barman brought three glasses of white wine.

Emma, who seemed to be relaxing with every moment, took an enormous sip of her drink. She gasped and gave a happy little shudder. ‘I needed that. So,’ she said, ‘I presume you two are friends.’

‘No,’ Leonie said, ‘we met on the plane. I’m terrified of flying and Hannah swapped seats with me. But as we’re travelling on our own, we sort of linked up.’

‘I’m here with my parents,’ Emma explained, then felt herself redden because she knew damn well the other two knew that.

Everyone who’d been on the plane had known it: you couldn’t miss her father. Now they’d really think she was some sort of weirdo who was tied to her parents. ‘My husband had to go to a conference and couldn’t come with us,’ she added. Nervousness made her tactless: ‘Do your partners not like cultural trips either?’

Hannah grinned. ‘I’m not seeing anyone right now and my last lover’ – her full lips curved into a smile at the thought of Jeff – ‘well, I don’t know if he’d have been into a trip to Egypt.’

‘My husband and I are divorced,’ blurted out Leonie. ‘We meant to come to Egypt on our honeymoon, but we were too broke at the time. I figured that if I waited until I was married again to come here, I’d be waiting a long time.’ She slumped in her seat, feeling miserable. It must be jet lag or something.

‘Don’t be so defeatist,’ Hannah said kindly. ‘If you want something, you’ll get it. If you want a man, go out and get one.’

Leonie stared at her in astonishment. Most of her friends – well, Anita and the female members of the gang, really – changed the subject brusquely if she mentioned her single status. They muttered that men weren’t everything and, God, sure didn’t they nearly murder Tony/Bill/whoever every five minutes for leaving the loo seat up or for never washing up so much as a spoon. ‘Wouldn’t you be as well off on your own,’ they chorused with fake cheeriness. ‘Nobody to act hopeless around the washing machine. And you have the kids, after all…’

But Hannah had no such compunction. ‘We’ll help you find a nice single bloke on the cruise,’ Hannah said. ‘There’s bound to be someone on the boat who’s longing for the love of a good woman.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ Leonie protested.

‘I’m not saying it is, but you can do it if you want to. It just takes a different approach these days. You’ve so much going for you, Leonie, you’d get a man no bother if you really put your mind to it.’ She patted Leonie’s arm reassuringly.

Leonie was still mouthing in shock. How lovely of Hannah to say she had a lot going for her, but how mad as a bicycle to imagine that getting a man was just a simple matter of deciding to do so and accomplishing it. Perhaps that’s how it happened to people like Hannah but not to her. I mean, she thought, where had all the available men been over the last few years? Waiting for her to emerge from the chrysalis of having children under the age of fourteen?

‘What do you mean by “putting your mind to it”?’ she asked finally.

‘Dating agencies, magazine adverts, even carmaintenance classes,’ Hannah said matter-of-factly. ‘You’ve got to try them all. That’s the way to meet people these days.’

‘My friend Gwen met her boyfriend through a dinner club,’ Emma pointed out.

‘A dinner club?’

‘It’s a club for singles and you all go out to dinner once a month and see what happens. Gwen says she met loads of men. Some strange guys too, mind you. But she met Paul and that’s all that matters to her.’

‘I’d put any man off me if he saw me eating,’ Leonie said, only half joking. ‘Or I’d have to do like Scarlett O’Hara and eat before I went out so I’d be able to nibble daintily in front of Mr Right. Women with big appetites put men off, I’m sure of it.’

‘I’d probably order the sloppiest thing on the menu and end up with sauce all over my chin and chunks of bread roll flying off to hit other people in the eye,’ laughed Emma, getting into the swing of things now that she’d had that wonderful glass of wine. ‘I’m so clumsy when I’m nervous.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ Hannah groaned.

Both Emma and Leonie thought that was unlikely. Hannah looked so self-possessed and calm. Even her hair obeyed her. Sleek and perfectly groomed, not a stray dark hair dangled from her neat ponytail.

‘Honestly, I am,’ she protested, seeing the looks of disbelief on their faces. ‘I went for a job interview a month ago and when I was supposed to be reaching into my attaché case to hand them details of this computer course I’d done, I stupidly reached into my handbag instead, and stuck my fingers right into my hairbrush. You know the way you get a bristle under the nail…?’

They all winced.

‘It bled like a ruddy artery and I had to get tissue, wrap the finger in it – all while my hand was still in my handbag! – and pretend nothing had happened for the rest of the interview. They must have thought I was hideously tense because I kept one hand clenched up all the time, trying to hide the tissue so I wouldn’t look like a casualty victim in need of a transfusion.’

‘You poor thing,’ Leonie said sympathetically. ‘Did you get the job in the end?’

Hannah’s grin of triumph lit up her face and the toffee-coloured eyes sparkled. ‘Yes. Bloody finger and all.’

She waved at a waiter and tried to order more wine.

‘I’ll have mineral water,’ Emma said quickly, thinking of both the baby and her father. She could still remember that awful moment at Kirsten’s wedding when he’d ticked Emma off in front of all the guests for having too much to drink.

‘So what is the job?’ asked Leonie. ‘What do you do?’

‘I was a hotel receptionist but I decided it was a dead-end job. It was a terrible hotel, really, but I took that job to get out of my old one which was even more dead-end, in a shop. My new job is office manager in an estate agent’s. I know it’s totally different, but I wanted to move jobs. I’ve done night courses in a management school for the past eight months and I’ve started an estate agent’s course. Not that I think I’d be lucky enough to branch into that part of things, you have to have loads of qualifications from what I can see, but it’s good to know all about the business.’

It was funny, Hannah realized. She hadn’t talked about herself to anyone for over a year, since Harry. And here she was, practically giving her life story to these two strangers. Holidays certainly had a bizarre effect on you – maybe it was the air.

‘Wow,’ Emma said admiringly. ‘A woman with a mission.’

‘I’ve got a mission all right – to make a career for myself. I got side-tracked for a few years,’ she added, not wanting to mention that the side-track had been nearly ten years with Harry, who’d let her sink into the squalor of coupledom before abandoning her for his South American trip.

‘And your mission,’ Hannah said to Leonie, deciding to change the subject, ‘is to find yourself a man, because that’s what you want. If I can turn myself into an office manager, you can find a man.’

‘Men, the root of all evil,’ sighed Leonie, starting on her second glass of wine. ‘I don’t mean that, really. I love men. That’s the problem,’ she added gloomily. ‘I think I scare them off. But I never thought of a dating agency. To be honest, I always thought only oddballs tried blind dating. Knowing my luck, I’d meet a serial killer or some nut with a fondness for PVC knickers and autoerotic asphyxia.’

Hannah laughed grimly. ‘I’ve met enough nuts without the help of a dating agency. Not PVC fetishists, mind you, but still mad. My last long-term boyfriend should have come with a government health warning and I met him in the safest place in the world: McDonald’s at lunchtime. So you may as well try dating agencies, Leonie. At least you get to pick who you’ll meet and who you won’t bother with.’

‘Harrison Ford,’ said Leonie dreamily. ‘I want a Harrison Ford clone who loves children, animals and overweight blonde divorcées.’

‘What about your man?’ Hannah asked Emma, who immediately smiled at the thought of Pete.

‘He’s lovely,’ she admitted. ‘I’m very lucky. He’s kind and funny and I love him to bits.’ Pete’s face appeared in her mind: the open, smiling face with the brown eyes, big grin and the dark hair cropped close to his scalp. Well, Pete always argued, there was no point wearing your hair long when there was so little of it. She loved his seriously receding hairline, loved kissing him on the top of his head and telling him that bald men were more virile. She wouldn’t have wanted Harrison Ford, or even Tom Cruise, for that matter. She couldn’t imagine either of them making her breakfast in bed when she felt ill, or massaging her shoulders when she got backache or insisting that she read a magazine while he made dinner on nights when she felt tired. Or leaving a lovely note buried in her suitcase telling her he loved her and that he couldn’t wait for her to get home. Pete adored her. Only his dislike of her father meant he’d let her go away for a week without him.

‘We’ve been married three years and he’s really good to me,’ she said. Then, because she couldn’t resist, she told them about the sweet note he’d left hidden between her T-shirts in the suitcase.

‘Oooh, that’s lovely,’ Leonie said.

She and Hannah were half-way down their second glasses of wine and they’d all been talking happily about why they’d decided to come to Egypt when the sound of Jimmy O’Brien’s booming voice could be heard from the doorway.

‘…if this is their idea of a first-class boat, I’ll be having words with that young courier woman, I’m telling you,’ he was saying loudly to another guest. ‘The shower’s useless and my towels got soaked because the shower curtain wasn’t any good. Call that first class? I don’t think so. Rip-off merchants, that’s what these bloody fellas are, pretending this is a first-class boat. Hmmph.

‘I’m not sitting outside,’ he added to his wife, ‘we’ll be eaten alive. Bloody mosquitoes.’

Hannah watched as Emma visibly shrank into her seat, her eyes briefly filled with an emotion Hannah could identify easily: wariness. Hannah’s mother’s face had often looked that way, usually when her father rolled home after a day at the races, roaring drunk, bad-tempered and looking for someone to take it out on. He’d been small and ran to fat, mostly beer fat, unlike Emma’s father who was a formidable man, tall and strong. A man who could intimidate people and liked doing it. He didn’t need alcohol to make him bad-tempered: it was obvious he was like that all the time.

Emma looked as if she’d rather have been keelhauled than face an evening with her parents. A surge of pity made Hannah reach out and touch her arm gently: ‘Would you like to sit with us at a separate table tonight?’ she asked quietly.

Emma looked relieved at the idea, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t, they’ll expect…’

‘Say you’re sure they’d like their first evening to be just for themselves, a romantic evening where you’re not a gooseberry,’ Hannah urged.

Emma stifled the desire to snigger at the thought of her parents having a romantic evening. Her father reckoned romance was for wimps. He’d openly laughed at Pete for buying her a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day.

‘Yeah,’ said Leonie, getting into the swing of things. ‘We need a third musketeer.’ Poor Emma was a lovely girl and obviously in need of saving from that obnoxious man. ‘Say you know one of us already and you want to chat.’

‘They’d never swallow that,’ Emma replied.

Mr O’Brien had spotted his daughter with two women he didn’t recognize and marched over to their table, his wife in his wake like a tug boat following a liner into port.

‘I don’t have a wide circle of friends and if we pretended, my father would give you the third degree and soon work out you were lying.’

Leonie tapped her nose enigmatically. ‘I happen to be a superb actress. We’ll say we know each other through your work. What do you do, anyway?’

‘I work for KrisisKids Charity. I’m in special projects,’ Emma said.

‘That’s run by that retired politician, Edward Richards, isn’t it?’ Leonie insisted. ‘His family owns Darewood Castle and the stud farm.’

Emma was pleased that Leonie knew enough about the charity to know who ran the organization. It meant their public relations company were doing their job. But she couldn’t see how Edward fitted into this particular evening’s equation.

‘I’m a vet nurse,’ Leonie added. ‘Our practice used to be their vets. Very posh, I believe,’ Leonie said.

‘Hello there,’ boomed Mr O’Brien, sizing up the seating arrangements and noticing with displeasure that there was only room for three chairs at the small table.

Emma immediately got up, smiled a nervous goodbye to the girls and led her parents to another table.

‘Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friends?’ her mother asked peevishly.

‘I thought you wanted to sit down, Mum,’ Emma said, not wanting to ruin her new friendship by making Hannah and Leonie meet her father. Grumpy after the flight, lord only knew what he’d come out with. ‘You can meet them later. Will I order you a mineral water?’

Her mother immediately started fanning herself with her hand and looked faint. ‘Yes, it’s so hot, that would be lovely.’

‘Sit down, Emma, and stop fussing,’ ordered her father brusquely. ‘The waiter will come – eventually. These Egyptians don’t seem keen to work. At home, you’d have a drink in your hand within a minute of arriving at the bar, but here…oh no, it’s a different kettle of fish altogether.’ He glared around at the bar where the waiter was busy serving a group of people who’d just arrived and were clamouring for cocktails. ‘No bloody concept of service,’ said Jimmy O’Brien loudly.

A few feet away, Hannah and Leonie grimaced at his rudeness. Emma cringed in her bamboo chair. This was a disaster. It didn’t matter that she was sitting in the balmy night air with the vibrant city of Luxor yards away and the treasures of the Nile waiting to be explored: she was on holiday with her father and he was going to ruin everything.

‘I’ll get the drinks,’ she announced suddenly, thinking she just had to get away before her father said something utterly offensive about the waiter.

Watching Emma practically run to the bar, her face bright pink with embarrassment, Leonie nudged Hannah: ‘Poor girl isn’t going to have much of a holiday if he carries on like that all the time. The man’s a pig and she’s mortified.’

‘I know,’ Hannah nodded. ‘But what can you do? He’s her father and she’s stuck with him.’

Leonie grinned wickedly. ‘Maybe not.’

Taking a deep breath, she rose from her seat and sailed across to the O’Briens’ table, one bracelet-bedecked hand outstretched.

‘Isn’t it a coincidence!’ Leonie trilled, shaking a surprised Jimmy O’Brien’s hand with the grace of a dowager duchess, flowing pink silk shirt rippling around madly. ‘Fancy Emma working with dear Cousin Edward in KrisisKids. Now that’s what I call a small world. I’m Leonie Delaney, from the Wicklow branch of the family.’ She took Anne-Marie’s limp hand and shook it gently, trying not to flinch at the cold-kipper sensation of the other woman’s handshake.

‘We’re the merchant banking side, rather than the political side. Daddy couldn’t have borne it if we’d gone into politics,’ Leonie added in a softer voice, as if this was some great family secret, ‘so low rent. De-lighted to meet you all.’

Hannah watched her in astonishment. One minute, Leonie had been sitting quietly; the next, she was a human dynamo, her collection of brass and enamel bracelets rattling as she twirled her curls in her fingers and pretended to be a merchant banking toff. It was a bravura performance, Oscar-winning stuff.

‘Edward Richards,’ Leonie was saying to Mrs O’Brien, determined to get the message home. ‘Dear Cousin Edward – Big Neddy is what we’ve always called him.’

Hannah nearly choked as her new friend described as ‘Big Neddy’ the elegant and aristocratic man she’d seen in the papers when he was a politician.

‘Of course,’ Leonie drawled in her recently acquired posh accent, ‘he hasn’t been to Delaney Towers for months. Daddy and Mummy do miss him.’

Realization dawned in Anne-Marie O’Brien’s face. This flamboyant woman with the unsuitable heavy make-up and that bizarre metal necklace thing was actually related to Emma’s boss, the madly rich and well-connected Mr Richards. He came from one of Ireland’s most famous political dynasties. This strange Leonie woman must be one of his cousins on his mother’s side. Well, Anne-Marie thought, arranging her face into a welcoming smile, the rich were allowed to be eccentric. Some of those computer millionaires wore nothing but jeans and desperate old T-shirts. You never knew where anyone came from any more.

And if Edward Richards’ cousin was on this cruise, then it must be one of the better ones, no matter what Anne-Marie’s suspicions had been when she’d seen the size of her cabin.

‘So pleased to meet you,’ Anne-Marie said in her breathy voice. ‘Anne-Marie and James O’Brien, of O’Brien’s Contractors, you know. Emma,’ she added, as Emma arrived with drinks and a wicked smile on her face at the sight of Leonie sitting with her parents, ‘you naughty girl, you should have introduced us to Leonie and told us who she is.’ She waggled a reproving finger at her daughter. ‘Why don’t you and your companion join us?’ Anne-Marie added.

‘We thought maybe Emma would sit with us,’ Leonie said dead-pan, ‘and leave you and your husband to enjoy a romantic evening à deux.’

Anne-Marie blinked at her, while Emma watched in a state of growing puzzlement. Her mother loved using French expressions, yet here she was staring at Leonie as if she didn’t understand à deux. How weird. Then again, this entire conversation was straight out of the X-Files anyway.

She felt bad about letting Leonie mislead her parents, but it would be blissful to have someone else to talk to on holiday. After an entire day with her father and no way of escaping him, she’d have gone off for a chat with someone in a straitjacket if they’d asked her.

‘That’s kind of you,’ said Jimmy O’Brien, who didn’t speak French but didn’t want to let on.

Emma’s mother was still staring at Leonie blankly. ‘What were we talking about again?’ she asked in a plaintive voice. There was something not quite right about her tonight, Emma felt. Something vague and distant. Her mother was never vague.

Leonie took charge. She relieved Emma of the two glasses of mineral water, put them down on the table in front of the O’Briens senior and slipped an arm through Emma’s.

‘We’ll leave you to it,’ she said sweetly.

‘What did you say to them?’ asked Emma when they were out of earshot, feeling as if she should scold a little bit.

‘I lied and said I knew your boss,’ Leonie said quickly, not wanting to get into a detailed explanation of her wicked ruse. ‘Said we wanted to chat. I mean, I know how it is with parents, they probably feel you’d be lost without them, when Hannah and I both know you’d like a bit of time out. And it gives them a chance to be on their own, second honeymoon stuff.’

Emma raised her eyebrows. Second honeymoon indeed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Leonie stood in front of the Temple of Hathor and knew why she’d come to Egypt. Blazing white heat shone down on her, lighting the dusty scene with a burning white intensity. The temple in front of her, carved by the fiercely proud Rameses II for his beloved queen Nefertari, was beautiful.

Rameses’ own temple at Abu Simbel was twice as breathtaking: towering figures of the great king himself looming over the tourists, majestic and exquisitely proportioned. To stare up at the fierce face of the great ruler made the long trip in the bus worth it. Just standing there in the desert sun, listening to the age-old sounds of hawkers trying to sell their wares and the hum of insects droning lazily overhead, Leonie felt as if she could have stepped back in time. She wondered what it must have been like to be one of the archaeologists who’d discovered the fabulous temple after it had lain buried in the desert sands for three thousand years. Or even better, she clutched her golden Egyptian cartouche pendant to her chest, imagining what it would have been like to be the Egyptian queen, Nefertari, honoured by all, beautiful, covered with priceless gold jewellery and awaiting the grand opening of the temple. Lost in her magical world of romance, Leonie felt exhilarated and dazed at the same time.

This was what people felt when they saw the Taj Mahal, she thought reverently. Stunned into silence by the physical proof of what mankind could do. For love. Like the Taj Mahal, built as the biggest love token ever, Nefertari’s temple had been built by her besotted husband because he loved his wife so much. No other Egyptian ruler had ever built such a monument, the tour guide had explained as the bus trailed slowly along the road in convoy from Aswan deep into the Nubian desert. They built temples in their own honour or richly decorated great tombs for their journey to the afterworld. But a temple dedicated to one they loved, never.

Imagine being loved so much by such a great king, Leonie thought dreamily. Imagine such a symbol of enduring love in your name…

‘Leonie, the tour’s starting. Are you coming?’

Hannah’s clear voice broke into her thoughts. Hannah and a relaxed-looking Emma were following their group towards the temple. As Leonie had discovered during the past two days on the tour, you could easily lose your group in the thousands who thronged around each Egyptian monument. She’d nearly lost them in the giant and confusing Edfu Temple and she was determined it wouldn’t happen again. Picking up her canvas bag, Leonie ran after them.

‘Wow,’ she gasped as she reached the shady spot to the left where Flora was waiting with the others, ‘it’s too hot to run.’

‘Too hot to do anything,’ Hannah agreed, pulling a strand of hair away from her damp forehead. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope with an hour of this.’

‘And then the bus journey back to the boat,’ groaned one of their fellow travellers, tired after the three-and-a-half-hour bus journey into the desert.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Emma said gaily. Her pale face was flushed in the heat and her hair was tied up in a ponytail to keep it away from her face. Wearing a little blue T-shirt and cotton Bermudas in a pretty madras check, she looked about twenty, and utterly carefree, Hannah thought fondly.

For the first time during the trip, Emma felt about twenty. Her mother was suffering from stomach problems and had decided she wasn’t up to the bus journey to visit Abu Simbel. Which meant that her father had cried off too, leaving Emma to enjoy the first Jimmy and Anne-Marie-free day since she’d got to Egypt. It was such a relief, like painkillers after a nagging, three-day toothache.

Neither of the O’Briens was enjoying the trip: her mother because she was in a state of high anxiety the whole time, even more so than usual. She’d behaved very strangely the previous evening at dinner, refusing to eat anything and sitting in a world of her own for the whole meal, staring into space. The heat was getting to her, Jimmy insisted. He, who’d instigated the trip to Egypt, was now telling anyone who’d listen that it hadn’t been his idea to come and muttering darkly about how Portugal had always done them very well up to now.

To make the day even more utterly delightful, Emma’s period still hadn’t come. She was pregnant, she knew it. Every time she went near the loo, she panicked in case a tell-tale trickle of pale pink stained the white loo roll. But nothing. Bliss.

Sighing with happiness, she linked both Leonie and Hannah’s arms and led them into the temple after Flora, who was holding a royal blue Incredible Egypt clipboard above her head to make sure her busload of people could see her.

In her state of expectant happiness, Emma was one of the few people who wasn’t mildly put out when the bus broke down only half an hour after leaving the temple on the drive home. Crunching to a noisy halt on the outskirts of a dusty little town, it refused to start up despite much swearing and banging on the bus driver’s part. Buses and taxis to Abu Simbel always travelled in convoys, Flora had explained earlier, in case one broke down mid-desert. But they were unfortunately the second-last bus in the convoy back to Aswan and the only vehicle behind them was a crowded mini-bus which couldn’t take any extra passengers.

‘Don’t worry, folks, it’ll be all right,’ Flora said bravely as the mini-bus driver and their driver fiddled around with the engine and talked volubly with much irate hand-waving.

Leonie, fascinated by the exotic signs of life around them, was happy enough to sit and look out of the window, but it did begin to get hot with the bus, and therefore the air conditioning, switched off. Emma was just happy full stop. Nothing could touch the blissful happiness inside her.

They’d get back eventually and she was quite content to sit there, one hand gently on her belly. Small, dark-eyed children waved up at the tourists on the bus and Emma beamed down at them, waving back. Soon she’d have her own darling child. Would it take after Pete or her? She’d prefer a dark-eyed baby, she decided. The vision of a dark-eyed baby in cute denim dungarees lulled her into a contented fantasy.

As well prepared as ever, Hannah had an extra bottle of water in her small backpack and she shared it between the three of them. Emma had boiled sweets, which filled the gap in Leonie’s stomach.

‘I’m getting used to three massive meals a day on the boat,’ she said ruefully. ‘I’m ravenous.’

‘Me too,’ Emma said. ‘But don’t worry, they’ll fix the bus,’ she added confidently.

‘I doubt it.’ Hannah wasn’t as confident. She hated disruptions to her routine. The bus was supposed to be back in Aswan at seven thirty in time for dinner at eight. They’d been stopped for at least, she checked her watch, twenty minutes, which meant they’d be late. Shit. She hated being late, hated disorder in her very ordered life. She could feel her pulse increase as the tension got to her. Beads of perspiration that had nothing to do with the heat broke out on her skin. Her nerve ends tingled in that familiar, agitated way. Calm down, Hannah, she commanded herself. If you’re late, so what? There’s nothing you can do about it and everyone else will be late too. It had been ages since she’d had a panic attack, she couldn’t be getting one now.

Flora clambered up the steps into the bus. ‘We’ll all have to get off, I’m afraid,’ she said, still looking calm in the face of mutinous passengers. ‘I’ve phoned the bus company and they’ll have another bus here in an hour and a half. I know it’s a long time, but it’s coming from Wadi al-Sabu which is half-way between here and Aswan. Hassan says there’s a lovely little restaurant in the town and I’ll buy us all dinner there as we’re going to be late back to the boat.’

A rush of angry mutterings greeted her words from the front of the bus, while the people at the back seemed more resigned to the news.

‘I’m starving,’ Leonie said. ‘Let’s find this place quickly.’ She looked around and realized that Hannah looked strangely put out. Which was unusual because Hannah was always so relaxed, so sure of herself. Hannah never appeared to worry about what to wear, what to eat or what people thought of her. Now she looked as taut as a tug-of-war rope at the news that they’d be delayed by a few hours.

Leonie wasn’t sure what to say to calm Hannah down but Emma said it for her, Emma, who was used to people getting anxious over delays.

‘There’s nothing we can do, Hannah,’ Emma said in firm tones they’d never heard her use before. ‘We’re stuck, we may as well make the best of it. We’ll be home eventually, so let’s not panic. Food will do us good.’

‘I know,’ Hannah agreed, taking as deep a breath as she could. ‘I hate delays, I’m so impatient. Hanging around for any length of time stresses me out.’ She followed Emma obediently off the bus while Leonie went last, forever amazed at people and the chameleon changes they could make. It was a mystery to her that quiet, nervous little Emma could suddenly become the cool, calm one, while Hannah became a wreck. Talk about role reversal.

As the group straggled up the town, people watched them; adorable dark-eyed children giggled and pointed at the foreigners, laughing at Emma’s bare legs and her pale skin. Proud-faced men in Arab dress looked darkly at Leonie, resplendent in flowing white silk, her golden hair tumbling wildly around her shoulders, her mouth a vivid crimson slash. With her golden cartouche and several strings of vibrant beads she’d bought locally wound around her neck, she looked utterly exotic in this dusty desert town where the dominant colour was beige.

‘Your husband is lucky fellow,’ smiled one local man admiringly before proffering some postcards of Abu Simbel.

Leonie tried not to grin but she couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth turning up slightly. For once, she was the one getting all the attention. ‘Thank you but no thank you,’ she said primly and grabbed Emma’s arm the way the guide book had warned single women should do to avoid harassment.

‘I won’t let anyone run away with you,’ teased Emma, watching the men watching Leonie. ‘You’re the big hit around here, and no mistake.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Leonie said, immeasurably flattered and trying not to show it. ‘I’m a mother of three who wears support tights, hardly a siren.’ But she couldn’t help feeling a little bit siren-ish. People – well, men – were looking at her. Not at Hannah with her cool elegance or at Emma with the milky-white skin and long, coltish grace.

It was the same in the restaurant: a large cool place with rough bench seating and faded cushions, it was staffed by three waiters who were obviously delighted to see a flamboyantly blonde, female tourist.

Flora, with her clipboard and mobile phone, was ignored as the men stared at Leonie appreciatively, treating her like a movie star.

‘Pretend you’re Madonna,’ suggested Hannah, her mood improving. It was ridiculous to get uptight because the bus had broken down. She really must learn to snap out of these moods.

Emma started singing ‘Like a Virgin’ as the three of them were escorted to their table, a large one in a spacious corner with much softer, more opulent-looking cushions than the rest and an elaborate candelabra.

Leonie, who couldn’t sing to save her life, joined in tunelessly, her voice wavering on the long drawn-out notes. She stopped long enough for the oldest waiter to usher her to the best seat, bowing formally as he did so. She bestowed a gracious smile on him and gave him a blast of sapphire eyes. He bowed even lower and hurried off, to return with three fragile painted glasses for them.

‘More Ribena,’ said Hannah, picking up her tiny glass and breathing in the scent of the non-alcoholic fruit drink they’d got used to on the boat.

‘I don’t need to tell you ladies to enjoy yourselves,’ Flora said, arriving at their table when everyone else was settled. ‘Just don’t forget you have to buy any alcoholic drink yourselves and the bus will be here at around eight.’

‘Leave?’ said Leonie in mock horror. ‘Flora, I may never leave this place.’

Although most local restaurants didn’t serve alcohol, when Leonie saw one of the waiters emerge from the back with a bottle of red wine, she said they must order one.

‘Now, let’s have a real girlie chat,’ she said happily when the first course of mezes had arrived and they each had a glass of Cru des Ptolemees.

By the main course – kofta lamb for Emma and Hannah, vegetarian hummus and kebabs for Leonie – they’d gone through men in general and were on to Hannah’s story of Harry. It had been quite a relief to tell someone about how devastated she’d been the day he’d announced that he was travelling round South America and that it was all over.

‘You think you know someone and then they drop a bombshell like that.’ Even a year later, talking about it hurt. She’d felt so betrayed, so abandoned. All the love and time and hope she’d invested in their relationship, and to have it all thrown back at her because he felt stifled and needed a break. He was like all men: feckless and uncaring. But she’d loved him so much. All the aerobics classes in the world couldn’t dim the pain of that. At least her new plan to steer clear of men – apart from the odd bit of fun with guys like Jeff – would protect her from having her heart broken again. It just wasn’t worth it.

‘What is he doing in South America?’ asked Leonie.

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Hannah said fiercely. ‘I haven’t heard from him since he left. Not a dicky-bird. He took all his stuff from the flat when I wasn’t there and left a note asking for letters to be forwarded to his sister. Huh! He had two chances of me doing that. I threw his new chequebook in the bin when it arrived, and all his tax forms.’ She grinned at the memory. ‘Then I kept getting phone calls from his boss at the paper because he was supposed to be writing this book for them on political scandals and he’d just left the country without telling them. That was Harry all over: run away instead of face the music,’ she said bitterly.

Both Leonie and Emma had been gratifyingly eager to castrate Harry if they ever slapped eyes on him, and Hannah found herself thinking how nice it was to have female friends to confide in again. She’d been too hurt by Harry to seek out all the female friends she’d let go by the wayside when she fell for him first. It was comforting now to have a bit of sisterly outrage and support.

‘I doubt I’ll ever trust a man ever again,’ she admitted slowly. ‘I shouldn’t have trusted Harry in the first place. I should have known.’

‘How could you?’ Emma asked. ‘You’re not a mind-reader.’

‘It’s nothing to do with mind-reading. It’s to do with men. They can’t be trusted, full stop,’ Hannah insisted. ‘Well, I can’t trust the men I meet, anyway. Your Pete sounds lovely, but I think some of us just aren’t cut out for relationships. They mess you up. Some women are better off on their own and that’s the sort of woman I am. I can take care of myself and I don’t need anyone else. That’s my plan.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ Leonie argued. ‘You’re beautiful, Hannah, you could have any man you want. You simply ended up with a guy who was weak and left you. That’s no reason to give up on men in general. You have to dust yourself off when it all goes wrong and start again.’

By dessert – fruit for all of them – they’d moved on to their personal theories on how to get over a man. Emma hadn’t had many boyfriends before Pete, so she pointed out that she wasn’t much of an expert. ‘I met Pete when I was twenty-five and I’d only been out with three men before that. Dad ran the last one off the premises when he arrived smoking a roll-up cigarette. Said he didn’t want me corrupted with drugs.’

They all laughed at that.

Leonie admitted that Ray had been her first real boy friend and that their split had been mutual, more or less, so she hadn’t needed to dust herself off. What Leonie couldn’t understand was how Hannah had decided to simply give up falling in love until she felt strong enough to cope with men on her own terms. They’d heard about the fabulous Jeff and how Hannah had decided that a post-Harry bonk would be good therapy.

‘How can you do that?’ asked Leonie, fascinated.

‘Do what?’ Hannah bit into a piece of watermelon, little squelches of juice slithering down her chin.

‘Decide that you won’t get involved with any guy but just treat him like a friend who happens to be a lover. I mean, what if you met someone gorgeous and you couldn’t help yourself and fell hopelessly in love?’

Leonie wanted to believe that someone gorgeous was always waiting around the corner, that it was a matter of kismet, destiny and the right Daily Mail horoscope when it happened. You’d fall in love, it was inevitable. Hannah wasn’t convinced.

‘Feeling terrible for months after Harry left, that’s how I can do it,’ she said. ‘After the pain I went through, I’m not about to go through it again. If I turn into a heartless cow who uses men, I don’t care. That happy, coupley love thing is not for me. I spent years doing that and where did it get me?’ she demanded. ‘Bloody nowhere. Harry upped and left when it suited him and all I had for ten years of love and affection was a huge spare tyre and a dead-end career. Men are a waste of space, apart from for rumpy-pumpy in the bedroom department.’

Emma broke out laughing at the pair of them. They were a howl. She loved sitting with her feet curled up on the cushioned bench, giggling and talking about men and sex.

She shifted to get more comfortable and felt a familiar ache ripple through her. An ache that turned swiftly from a distant pain into a hard one, gnawing at her insides. Her period. God, no, she shrieked silently. It couldn’t be. She was pregnant, she was sure of it.

Emma stared at the others in dread, hoping they’d developed a similar pain, something to do with the lamb or a dodgy shrimp or anything…It rippled through her again. An unmistakable pain, the sort teenage girls who’d just had their first period could never adequately explain to their non-menstruating friends. Once felt, it was never forgotten.

Her period. There was no baby, Emma realized. There never had been. Probably never would be. Grief hit her in a wave.

She pushed herself away from the table clumsily, dropping her napkin and spilling what was left of her single glass of wine. ‘Must go to the loo,’ she said shakily.

In the dusty toilet with no lock on the door, Emma’s fears were confirmed. She was numb as she looked at the tell-tale droplets of red in the toilet bowl. Using a wad of loo roll as a make-shift sanitary towel, she walked slowly back to the table, feeling lifeless and drained.

One look at Emma’s white face and Leonie and Hannah knew something was wrong.

‘Are you sick?’ Hannah asked in concern.

‘Was it something you’ve eaten?’ said Leonie.

Emma shook her head dazedly.

‘It’s my period,’ she said simply. ‘I thought I was pregnant, I was sure I was and now…’ her voice broke as she started to cry, ‘I’m not.’

She sank into her seat beside Leonie, who immediately flung an arm round her. ‘You poor, poor thing,’ Leonie crooned in the same soft voice she used when the children were sick or upset.

As Emma cried, great heaving sobs that shook her entire fragile body, Leonie was shocked at how thin she was under her T-shirt: not elegantly slim, the way Leonie longed to be. But bony, almost skeletally thin, her ribs sticking out like rack of lamb.

‘You poor darling. I know it’s awful, but you’re so young, you’ve years ahead of you, Emma,’ Leonie soothed, hoping it was the right thing to say. ‘Lots of couples take months to conceive.’

‘But we’ve been trying for three years,’ Emma said between giant hiccuping sobs. ‘Three years and nothing. I know it’s me and I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t have a baby. What’s wrong with me? Why am I different? You have children, why can’t I?’

Leonie and Hannah’s eyes met over the table. There was nothing they could say. They’d both read of women tortured by their inability to have a child: neither of them had ever met anyone in that appalling position. Or, if they had, the women in question had obviously kept it a secret. Leonie dredged her memory for information on infertility. Hadn’t she read something about couples who finally had babies when they stopped trying so frantically and relaxed? And Emma being so thin couldn’t help. The poor girl was literally wasting away with nerves and strain: she didn’t have a hope of getting pregnant while she was like that.

‘The stress of wanting a baby so badly may be affecting you,’ Leonie said finally. ‘You know, some people make themselves ill because they want it so much and then, once they take a step backwards, they get pregnant.’ It sounded so lame the way she’d said it, like telling a fairy story about Santa Claus to a knowing and deeply suspicious ten-year-old.

‘Why didn’t I get pregnant when we were first married?’ sobbed Emma. ‘We weren’t really trying then. Or before we got married. Pete was always terrified the condom would burst and I’d get pregnant. He said my father would kill him. Maybe we’re being punished for something, sex before marriage or…I don’t know.’ She looked at them both wildly, her face pink and streaked with tears. ‘What is it? I’m not really religious, but I’d pray for hours every day if I thought it’d work.’

‘Look at me,’ Hannah urged. ‘You’re not being punished for anything, Emma. Don’t be so daft. I’m five years older than you and I haven’t even met the man I want to have kids with, so you’re doing miles better than I am. If you work on the everything-that-goes-wrong-in-your-life-is-a-punishment theory, I must have done something terribly wrong to get landed with Harry and then get dumped. Now I don’t have even one prospective father of my unborn children on the horizon.’ She didn’t add that children were the last thing on her mind, prospective father or no prospective father.

Emma’s sobs subsided a little.

‘Maybe you could investigate what’s wrong,’ Leonie suggested. ‘Even if there’s a problem, doctors can do incredible things nowadays if you’re infertile. Look at all the babies born thanks to in vitro fertilization.’

Emma shook her head miserably. ‘I couldn’t put Pete through all that. It’s a nightmare, I saw a programme about it on the telly. And…’ she wiped her eyes in despair, ‘he doesn’t know how I feel, not really. He loves kids, he doesn’t understand that if you can’t have one after three years, you’ve no hope. I can’t tell him that.’

The others looked at her in alarm.

‘You haven’t told Pete any of this?’ Hannah asked gently.

‘He knows I want a baby, but I couldn’t really tell him how desperately I want one.’

‘Why not?’ Leonie asked in disbelief. ‘Surely you have to share this with him – he loves you, after all.’

Emma shrugged her thin shoulders helplessly: ‘I keep thinking that if I don’t say anything, the problem will be in my imagination and I might still get pregnant. If we do something about it, I know it’ll be my fault and they’ll tell me I can never have a baby…I just know it.’ Her eyes glazed over, her mind off in some faraway place.

‘Ladies, we’re going. The bus is here.’ Flora’s crisp, clear voice startled them and they realized that the other people from the tour were collecting their belongings and wandering out of the restaurant, clutching the inevitable plastic bottles of mineral water.

Hannah waved the waiter over and quickly paid for the wine, shaking off Leonie’s suggestion of going halves. Emma didn’t say a word.

A subdued trio climbed back on the bus, Emma red-eyed and Hannah staring blankly out into the night. What was wrong with her, she wondered. Why didn’t she want children with the same blinding intensity as Emma? Was she abnormal? They’d simply never been a part of her life-plan, a plan that revolved around one facet: security. Making her way in life and being secure so that she’d never have to rely on a man again, the way her mother had had to rely on that feckless lump of a father of hers. Those years with Harry had been a fatal blip in her mission, years when she’d gone all cosy, practically married and ambitionless, and had forgotten that when you most needed them, men had a habit of failing you. Well, never again. She’d build her career up and make sure she never needed a man ever again.

Flings with men like Jeff Williams were allowed: simple physical relationships with people who wouldn’t dare to mess with her life. And as for children, they didn’t feature in her plans either. Maybe she was heartless, but she didn’t think she’d make a very good mother. She still pitied Emma though. She knew how destructive it was to long for something you simply couldn’t have. She knew too damn well. Harry’s fault, again. Bugger Harry.

Leonie, Emma and Hannah sat on the upper deck in the late afternoon as the boat sailed up the river towards Luxor. With three weak cocktails in front of them, they watched the golden, glowing disc of the sun set on the left-hand side. The rays turned the mountains to the right a deep, mysterious rose gold. Palm trees clustered around the banks, as if planted by a clever gardener who knew how to achieve that artistically pleasing random effect.

‘I half expect to see elephants charging from out of the trees, like in Africa,’ said Emma dreamily.

‘You are in Africa,’ said Leonie with a grin.

‘Oh no, the sun’s finally affected my brain,’ Emma groaned.

‘Sun my ass, it’s all those Fuzzy Navels you’ve been guzzling,’ Hannah pointed out. ‘I know they’re weak ones, but you’ve had two.’

It was a perfect time of day to sit quietly and watch the valley pass by. The air was cooler than in the early afternoon and as the boat sailed north along the Nile, a refreshing breeze blew against them, rippling Emma’s loose hair like a hairdryer.

It was the second last day of their holiday and they were all eager to take in every single detail of the country, determined not to forget a thing. The next day they were going to be busy the whole time, visiting the Valley of the Kings and Queens in the morning, and Karnak in the afternoon. There wouldn’t be a spare moment in their exhausting itinerary, Flora had warned, advising everyone to take advantage of their afternoon off.

The girls had been only too pleased to comply. Emma’s parents had decided to join in the card game in the inner bar after lunch and Jimmy O’Brien had done his best to get Emma on their team. But she’d refused.

‘I’m going to sunbathe, Dad,’ she’d said firmly.

He looked genuinely surprised. ‘But wouldn’t you rather be with me and your mother?’

Hannah and Leonie finished their coffee and began to leave the lunch table discreetly, not wanting to embarrass Emma by being present for what seemed like an inevitable spat with her father. But Emma took strength in their presence. She couldn’t imagine either Hannah or Leonie being browbeaten by their father.

‘Dad,’ Emma said pleasantly, with an unaccustomed hint of steel in her voice, ‘of course I like being with you and Mum, but we’re not joined at the hip. I want to sunbathe and I don’t want to play cards. Enjoy yourself.’ She got up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, hoping to defuse her words with the gesture. It worked. Her father remained uncharacteristically silent.

Or plain old shocked because Emma had stood up to him, Hannah guessed shrewdly. If she’d been a psychiatrist, she could have written an entire thesis on Jimmy O’Brien. After five days of watching him, she’d decided he was a horrible man with an inflated opinion of himself.

On Wednesday, he’d insulted the pretty young belly dancer who’d arrived on the boat with a band of musicians by telling her loudly that she ‘should put some clothes on and not strut around with everything hanging out like some common floozie’. Only Flora’s immediate interference had prevented an international incident, because the lead musician looked as if he was ready to smash his electric keyboard down on Jimmy’s head.

‘Let’s not be hasty,’ Flora had said soothingly, placating all around her and gently leading Jimmy and Anne-Marie off to another part of the bar where she had to listen to ten minutes of a lecture on ‘Why It Was A Shame These People Weren’t Respectable Catholics’. Emma had been crimson with shame and had barely been able to look the belly dancer in the eye.

Somebody as self-effacing as Emma didn’t stand a chance of standing up to her father, Hannah realized, taking another sip of her cocktail. Her mother was plain odd. Chatty one minute, she’d lapse into silence the next, staring off into the middle distance with a vacant expression on her face.

‘She’s not normally like that,’ Emma had said worriedly one day when Anne-Marie had broken off what she was saying mid-sentence and begun humming. ‘Dad insists the heat is affecting her badly, but she’s normally so alert. I can’t imagine what’s wrong.’

The three women had spent a blissful afternoon sunning themselves on the top deck, reading, chatting, sipping mineral water and listening to the endlessly replayed disco classics record that emanated from the boat’s speakers. Whoever was in charge of the music on the boat had a limited selection and veered between seventies disco hits and songs from old musicals.

‘If I hear “Disco Inferno” one more time, I’ll kill someone,’ Leonie said, finishing her Fuzzy Navel and wondering if she’d have another before dinner.

‘At least they’ve lowered the volume,’ Emma interjected.

‘Only because it was frightening the cows,’ Leonie pointed out.

In places where the river widened, there were isolated grass banks surrounded by water, where cows grazed serenely, none of them appearing concerned that there was no obvious way back to the land.

‘There must be strips of land back to the bank, a pathway we can’t see,’ Hannah said, peering at the latest batch of cows on a marshy island, her eyes peeled for a walkway. ‘They couldn’t swim, surely? The crocodiles would get them.’

‘Sobeks would get them – descendants of the crocodile god, Sobek,’ said Leonie, who loved hearing about the Egyptian gods and studied her guide book every night to learn more about the sights they were going to see the next day.

‘Teacher’s pet,’ teased Hannah, lobbing her drink’s cocktail umbrella over at her.

‘You’re just jealous,’ retorted Leonie good-humouredly, throwing the little umbrella back. It bounced on the table and flew off over the side of the boat. ‘I’m going to get a gold star on my copybook for figuring out the great mystery of the fish sacrifice.’

‘That was a marvellous piece of deduction,’ Hannah admitted.

They’d all laughed heartily the night before when Leonie had come up with a reason why fish were never shown as offerings to the gods on the various temple carvings. Flora, the guide, usually left them with an unanswered question at the end of a tour and told them that she’d explain it the next day.

Yesterday, Flora had answered the question about why Hatshepsut was the only queen buried in the Valley of the Kings and had posed another conundrum – about the fish sacrifices.

Leonie, who was fascinated with Egyptian myths, decided that the answer to the question lay in the story of the god Osiris. Hannah and Emma, sitting in the comfort of Hannah’s cabin sharing a bottle of peach schnapps as a nightcap, laughed so much at her solemn explanation that they nearly fell off the bed.

‘When Osiris’s evil brother, Seth, killed Osiris and dismembered his body, scattering it around Egypt, Osiris’s distraught wife, the goddess Isis, found all the pieces and put them back together,’ Leonie explained enthusiastically. ‘The only part she couldn’t find was his penis, which had been eaten by a fish. So that’s it.’

Hannah crowed with laughter. ‘You’re telling us that fish can’t be used as a sacrifice because a fish ate Osiris’s willy?’

‘Yes, it’s perfectly sensible to me.’

Emma, who had discovered that she really liked peach schnapps, got a fit of the giggles. ‘But we had fish for dinner tonight,’ she managed to say, between laughs. ‘I think I’m going to puke!’

‘You’re a right pair of cultural illiterates,’ Leonie said loftily. ‘I don’t know why you came to Egypt at all. You should have gone off to Ibiza with a couple of blokes with tattoos and a ghetto-blaster.’

Emma fell off the bed with a resounding bump. She put a hand over her mouth and giggled at the noise she’d made.

‘Your father will be up in a moment to haul you off to bed,’ Hannah squealed. ‘I’ll tell him I’ll set Seth on him…geddit, set Seth…’ She roared with laughter and Emma joined in.

‘I’d like to see his face with his willy gobbled up by a fish,’ roared Emma.

Leonie, who’d been so intent on her ancient Egyptian theory that she’d only had a quarter as much peach schnapps as the other two, gave up. She hauled Emma back on to the bed and then poured herself a huge drink. If you can’t beat them, join them, she decided.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to tell people when I get home and they ask me who I met in Egypt,’ she said, downing her drink in three gulps. ‘They’ll all think I had this cultured time talking about ancient civilizations with like-minded people, when in fact, I’ve been stuck with two insane, sex-mad alcoholics who think the pyramids are secretly flying saucers.’

‘You mean they aren’t?’ demanded Hannah.

‘Shut up and have another drink,’ Leonie ordered.

The Fuzzy Navels they were drinking on the upper deck the following evening helped with the hangovers.

‘Wave at the waiter and order us another round, will you?’ Hannah asked Emma, who was facing the small upstairs bar where the waiters hung out.

‘I need to go to the loo,’ Emma said, ‘but I can hear my father from here. He’s downstairs and I don’t want to have to go down or he’ll try to make me sit with him.’

‘He’s a bit bossy,’ Leonie ventured. She’d love to have said that Jimmy O’Brien was a domineering bully but knew she couldn’t.

‘You have no idea,’ Emma said fervently. The Fuzzy Navels were going to her head. ‘He has to be in charge and he has to be right all the time. It’s a nightmare.’

‘But you stood up to him earlier,’ Leonie pointed out.

‘And I’ll have to pay later. He hates his authority being questioned publicly.’

‘Do you see much of your parents at home?’ Hannah enquired.

‘I see them all the time,’ Emma explained. ‘They live around the corner from us. Pete and I couldn’t have afforded a house on our salaries so Dad loaned us the deposit, then he insisted on our buying this house he liked. It’s about five minutes from my old home.’

Hannah winced. ‘So he feels he can drop in when he wants to and tell you what to do, on the basis that he’s funded you.’

‘Bingo.’ Emma thought of how her father manipulated things so that she and Pete had Sunday lunch at the O’Briens’ every fortnight, and how the question of what to do for Christmas never came up. It was the family do at the O’Briens’ and that was it.

‘Are you the only child?’ Leonie asked.

‘I’ve a younger sister, Kirsten, the one who got away. She’s married and her husband is very successful. Dad adores her. But she’s managed to get out of all the family stuff. She’s managed to get out of having a job, too, because Patrick, my brother-in-law, is loaded. Basically, Kirsten does what Kirsten wants.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Hannah remarked. ‘My brother, Stuart, is the same. When we were growing up, I had to look after my mother’s hens in the summer and baby-sit for our relatives. Stuart never had to so much as wash a cup. Lazy pig. He was my mother’s pride and joy, now his wife is the same. Pam treats him like he’s next in line for the throne. We’re not close, I should add.’

‘Kirsten and I get on really well,’ Emma said. ‘She’s great fun and I love spending time with her. It’s a miracle I don’t hate her, really, since Dad is so besotted with her. Do you have brothers or sisters, Leonie?’

‘No, just me and my mother. And we get on really well,’ she added, feeling almost guilty that she wasn’t like the other two, both of whom appeared to have problem families. ‘My father died years ago and Mum just gets on with her own life. She works part-time, goes to the cinema and hill-walks, oh yes, she’s started playing golf. She does more than me, actually. She’s never at home in the evenings, while I catch every episode of every soap on TV. Mum is very easy-going and easy to be with.’

‘Like you,’ Hannah said.

‘I suppose I am easy-going,’ Leonie agreed. ‘Most of the time. But I do have a ferocious temper which explodes once in a blue moon and then…watch out.’

The other two pretended to duck under the table in fear. ‘Will you warn us when you’re about to explode?’ Emma asked in a meek voice.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll see it coming! I’ll be sorry to go home,’ Leonie said wistfully as they watched the sun sink.

‘That’s the sign of a good holiday,’ Emma said.

‘I mean, I’ll be happy to be home, but it’s been wonderful here. And I’ll miss you two.’

Hannah smiled but said nothing.

‘Me too,’ Emma added earnestly.

Hannah spoke then. ‘I know they always say that holiday romances never transfer to the real world when the holiday is over, but it can’t be the same for holiday friendships. We’ve had great fun together. Let’s meet up when we get home and try and stay friends. What do you both think?’

Emma grinned delightedly. ‘I’d love that. We all get on so well, it’d be great.’

‘Yeah, we could have dinner once a month or something,’ Leonie suggested enthusiastically. ‘We could meet at some midway point between where we all live.’

She thought about it. Her home was in Wicklow, south of the city and an hour’s drive from the centre of Dublin. Emma was in Clontarf in north Dublin, which was a forty-minute drive into the centre of the city, while Hannah lived in the city near Leeson Street Bridge.

‘My place is pretty much half-way between you two,’ Hannah said. ‘Sorry. You’ll have to do all the driving.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Leonie said. ‘This holiday was about starting something new and since I didn’t fall in love with some Omar Sharif lookalike, making two fabulous new friends is the next best thing.’

‘You mean we’re second best?’ asked Emma, throwing her cocktail umbrella at Leonie.

Leonie laughed and threw it back. ‘Only kidding. Right, let’s plan the first get-together now. Two weeks after we get back so we still have a bit of a tan to wow the rest of the world. Oh, yeah, we can get our photos developed and bitch about our fellow travellers.’

‘It’s a deal,’ Hannah said.

They clinked their now-empty glasses.

‘To the Grand Egyptian Reunion,’ Emma said loudly. ‘Now, shall I order more drinks?’

CHAPTER SIX

Dragging her suitcase behind her, Emma opened her front door and breathed in the scent of a house where the windows hadn’t been opened since she left. The peace lily in the hall looked like a weeping willow, its leaves drooping with thirst, while the newel post of the banisters was armour-plated with a selection of Pete’s raincoats and sweaters. Ignoring the mess, Emma abandoned the suitcase at the bottom of the stairs and headed for the kitchen.

There was a note on the kitchen table, lying amid a week’s worth of newspapers, supplements and junk mail. Emma put down her handbag, shivered in the chill of the Irish August which seemed so icy after Egypt, and switched on the kettle. Only then did she read the note.

Can’t wait to see you, darling. I’m at a match. Back at seven. I’ve dinner under control. Don’t do anything.

Love, Pete

She grinned. Dinner under control probably meant he’d stop off at Mario’s on the way home and pick up a giant Four Seasons pizza with a side order of garlic potatoes.

She brought her tea and the luggage upstairs and started to unpack. Out of the suitcase came skirts, T-shirts and underwear, all mingled up with the postcards she couldn’t resist and the pretty fake alabaster Egyptian figurines she’d bought in the souk in Luxor. She took one out of its tissue wrapping, marvelling at the detail of the carving on the falcon god, Horus.

It’d fall apart given a sharp knock, Flora the tour guide had warned the Nile cruisers, explaining that real alabaster statues were hand-made and built to last, unlike their cheap street-market relatives. Emma hadn’t cared. She’d wanted some cheap’n’cheerful souvenirs for the people in the office and, at three Egyptian pounds each, these statuettes fitted the bill perfectly. Happy with her purchases, she pulled the others from their wrapping until all six were uncovered and she began to plan which one she’d give to which colleague.

She took her sandals from the plastic bags she’d wrapped them up in and threw dirty clothes into the laundry basket which was already groaning with Pete’s stuff.

Her mind wasn’t really on unpacking: she was dying to see Pete and tell him everything; about her new friends and all the places they’d been…Then her hand touched something cool, soft and plastic. From under the folds of clothes she hadn’t worn, she unearthed the big pack of sanitary towels, an Egyptian brand she’d never heard of with a picture of a dove on the front. She took the packet slowly from the case and the pain hit her again. The pain of knowing that there had been no baby growing safely inside her, wrapped in fierce love and protected from the world by Emma’s body. No baby to rest its downy head against her breast, no soft mouth instinctively searching for the nipple, no crying, innocent little creature utterly dependent on Emma for everything.

The pain came from deep within herself. Her chest hurt, her head hurt, it felt as if even the bones of her body ached with the very hurt of it all. She heard a noise and realized it was herself, crying, keening like a woman at a funeral.

After days of holding on, she finally let the heartache out: every twinge of anguish, every pang of loss. It was as if a dam had burst.

Now that she was here, crouched on her own bedroom floor, leaning against the bed, she could cry to her heart’s content over her lost baby. Because it was a lost baby to her. Another chance lost, another life she’d been so sure had been inside her gone. Leonie and Hannah had been good to her; they’d tried their best to understand and comfort her. But they didn’t understand. Leonie had children, three lovely kids. Hannah didn’t seem to want children yet, although Emma would never be able to understand how any woman could not want children. But she didn’t. So it was different for them.

But Emma, she wanted her own baby with an intensity that was killing her. It had to be killing her, she thought as the tears ran unchecked down her cheeks, it hurt so much. That much hurt couldn’t be good for you. It had to be like cancer, eating away inside you until there was nothing left but a shell, nothing but hate and rage and anger at anyone who had that one simple thing denied her.

Everybody else had children so effortlessly. People had babies by mistake, people had abortions. Emma was always reading about women in the newspapers who said things like: ‘Little Jimmy was an accident after the other six, we’d never planned him…’

Even worse, her work with KrisisKids meant she was constantly exposed to the stories of abused and abandoned children, defenceless kids who’d been let down by the people who were supposed to love them most: their parents. It was as well, Emma reflected, that her role in the charity was administrative because if she had to personally deal with the crying kids who rang their helpline, she didn’t know how she’d have been able to cope. The counsellors found it hard enough, she knew. Sometimes they left abruptly after their shift, white-faced and drained, unable to chat with their colleagues because there was simply no way to go from hearing a child’s most terrible secrets to idly discussing the weather or what was on the TV that night. Emma knew she’d have been hopeless when faced with a child haltingly telling her about the cigarette burns or how daddy climbed into her bed at night and told her to keep a secret. Those people weren’t parents: they were evil creatures, demonic. What she couldn’t understand was why God gave them the gift of a child.

But then, how did God work out who got kids and who didn’t? Who decided that Emma would remain childless while some blithe, unconcerned women had families the size of football teams? The rage she felt for those mothers shocked her. She wanted to kill them, women who took it all for granted. Who had no idea what it was like to yearn for a child, who simply laughed when the pregnancy test was positive, and said things like: ‘Oh well, another kid for the football team!’ or ‘We’ve always meant to start a family, we may as well start now!’

She hated them, hated them with all her being.

Nearly as much as those women who held their children like trophies, proudly and smugly letting the world know that they had babies, even if some poor helpless women couldn’t get the hang of it. Emma thought she hated those women most of all: they looked down at her, she knew it.

Like Veronica in the office, who wore her motherhood like a badge of honour, never ceasing to tell all and sundry about little Phil and how cute he was, never forgetting to slyly ask Emma if she didn’t want children herself.

Veronica knew. Emma was sure of it. That knowledge was her lever over Emma, her boss.

‘Phil is crawling around the house like a little rocket these days,’ she’d announced recently as they all sat in the back office having their lunch. Then she’d directed a comment at Emma who hadn’t really been paying attention: ‘I can’t believe you and Pete haven’t started a family yet, Emma. You don’t want to leave it too late, you know. And then find out you couldn’t have kids!’ she trilled, her voice grating.

Emma could have killed Veronica there and then. Instead she’d smiled woodenly and managed to get a few words out: ‘There’s plenty of time, we’re in no hurry.’

She thought of Veronica as she sat there silently on the bedroom floor, the tears drying saltily on her cheeks. How would she ever face Veronica on Monday? Phil was bound to have done something miraculous for a toddler of his age during the past week and no doubt Veronica would be discussing whether to ring the Guinness Book of Records or not. Everyone would be asked their opinion and Veronica would give the subject far more attention than she ever gave her work. She wasn’t a very good assistant. Maybe that was why she hated Emma and was so knowingly malicious. Emma was good at her job and childless. Veronica was bad at hers and was in training to be an earth mother. It was her only advantage and she used it.

Emma shivered. It was cold in the house: Pete hadn’t thought to leave the heating on when he’d gone out. Her limbs felt stiff and achey, and she still had that lower back pain she got when she had her period. Finally, she got up and went into the bathroom to wash her face.

A blotchy-faced woman stared at her from the smeary bathroom mirror. A woman who looked young enough if you just took in her unlined face and pale skin dusted with a faint tan, but who looked a thousand years old if you stared at the bruised, hurt eyes.

The familiar pink bottle of baby lotion mocked her from its position on the shelf above the sink. She used it for taking off her eye make-up. Not that she didn’t have proper eye make-up removers, of course. But she loved the smell of it, the baby smell of it. Sometimes, she rubbed it on her skin as moisturizer and imagined the smell of a small baby, nuzzling close to her, scented with baby lotion. Today, she shoved the bottle in the medicine cabinet where she wouldn’t have to look at it.

Emma splashed water on her face and forced herself to apply some make-up. She didn’t want to look like a death’s head when Pete arrived home. It wasn’t fair to lay all this grief on him, wasn’t fair to make him suffer the same pain purely because she wasn’t pregnant again. She had to go through too much agony because of her barren, useless womb: why should he have to go through it all too? Sometimes she wondered if she was right to keep her fears from him. Would it tear them apart, her longing for a baby and keeping it to herself? No, she decided. She wouldn’t let it.

Just in case, she took one of her mother’s Valiums. After a while, she felt marginally better, good enough to shove a load of clothes in the washing machine. She still moved around mechanically, but she could manage.

She was curled up in an armchair watching the costume drama that Pete had kindly taped for her while she was away, when she heard his key in the lock.

‘I’m home, darling. Where are you?’

‘In the sitting room.’

He was at the door in an instant, the back of his short dark hair still damp from the shower because he wouldn’t have bothered to dry it. Solidly built and reliable, he was the perfect defensive player for his soccer team and sufficiently dependable-looking to make a very good sales rep.

His guileless face with the wide-spaced laughing brown eyes and the honest smile was appealing enough to make many a female office manager order far more stationery than she’d originally intended, simply because Pete told her she’d need it. He only said that when it was true. For his guileless expression wasn’t a put-on job: Pete Sheridan was one of nature’s gentlemen – kind, genuine and nice to children and animals. He’d never cheat on his expenses or walk out of a shop letting the cashier give him change for a twenty when he’d only paid with a tenner. Scrupulously honest was the perfect description of Pete.

Now he threw himself on top of Emma joyfully and kissed her face and neck until she squealed that he was tickling her.

‘Missed you,’ he said.

‘Missed you too.’ She held on to him, gaining comfort from his closeness. She loved him so much, adored him. All she wanted, Emma thought, her face hard against the rough wool of his heavy sweater, was his baby. She felt her eyes tear up again and bit her lip harshly in an attempt to stop them. She was not going to break down in front of Pete. She’d promised herself.

‘Get off me, you big lump,’ she said jokily, trying to make her voice light-hearted. ‘You’re flattening me.’

‘Sorry.’

While her husband levered himself off the armchair, Emma wiped her hand over her eyes, whisking away the tears.

Pete threw himself on to another chair from where he could reach over and hold her hand.

‘Tell me everything. How was the trip and how was your father? He didn’t get arrested and thrown into an Egyptian prison or anything, did he?’

In spite of herself, Emma grinned. ‘No, although I’m surprised the tour guide didn’t arrange it. You want to have heard him giving out yards to her when he discovered we had to pay extra to bring cameras into some of the sights.’ She shuddered at the recollection and her face burned in remembered shame.

‘Oh God, a female tour guide,’ groaned Pete. ‘That won’t have gone down well.’ It was no secret that Jimmy O’Brien believed women were less evolved than men. Certainly no secret to his daughter, who’d been brought up hearing the impatient words, ‘Here, let me do that. Women are useless at practical things,’ all the time. It had never bothered Kirsten because she liked other people doing things for her and had no intention of learning to do anything that involved being practical.

‘Tell me about it,’ Emma sighed. ‘He lost his temper totally in the Valley of the Kings and started yelling at Flora about how we’d paid for the tour and shouldn’t have to pay any extra to use our cameras. Then he said that it was obvious the ticket-office people were taking advantage of her because she was a woman and they knew she’d fall for a scam like that, so why didn’t he go in and sort things out.’

‘Business as usual,’ Pete remarked sagely. ‘He’s quite a character, your father.’

Character, felt Emma, wasn’t the word.

‘Egypt was incredible,’ she enthused, squeezing Pete’s hand to show him that she was thrilled to be back, ‘but if it hadn’t been for these two women I met on the trip, Leonie and Hannah, I don’t think I’d have remained sane. Dad drove me mad and Mum is definitely losing her marbles, or losing something.’

‘It’s your father,’ Pete said. ‘He has that effect on everyone.’

‘No.’ Emma shook her head emphatically. ‘It’s nothing to do with Dad, for once. She’s getting very forgetful. She kept wittering on about the foreign currency and trying to work out how many Egyptian pounds there were to Irish ones. Normally she’d leave that sort of thing to Dad, but this time she became obsessed with working it out. She was vague a lot of the time, as if she wasn’t aware of where she was. I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it but there’s something not quite right.’

‘Come on.’ Pete got to his feet and held out a hand to pull Emma from her chair. ‘Let’s put the pizza in the oven and you can tell me about these two women you met on the trip. If they can perform the phenomenal feat of keeping your mind off your parents, can they come and stay with us for Christmas?’

‘There’s a thought,’ Emma groaned, thinking of the trauma of enforced festive jollity in the O’Brien house, a place where peace and goodwill to all men was an alien concept. ‘You’d love them, Pete. Hannah is really confident and fun. Dad couldn’t stand her, naturally. And Leonie is sweet. She’s got three kids, she’s divorced, and I think she’s really lonely. Hannah insists our mission in life is to find a nice husband for Leonie.’

‘Neil is looking for a sweet divorcée,’ Pete said, referring to one of his old schoolfriends. ‘We could fix them up.’

‘Neil is looking for a sex-bomb housekeeper whom he doesn’t have to pay and, no, I wouldn’t dream of setting poor Leonie up with him,’ Emma said sternly. ‘She’s been through enough in her life without getting stuck with Neil, his dandruff and his Newcastle fetish.’

‘I’ll tell him you said that.’ Pete inexpertly cut the plastic wrapper off the pizza and jammed it into the oven, which was so dripping with blackened tomato and burnt mozzar-ella that Emma knew he’d eaten nothing but frozen pizzas all week. ‘We’re meeting him down the pub later.’

She groaned. ‘Do we have to, love? I thought we’d have a quiet night in now that I’m home.’

Pete completed his cordon bleu preparations by switching the oven on, and then put his arms round Emma.

‘I know, but I couldn’t help it. It’s Janine’s birthday and Mike wants us to celebrate with them.’

Mike worked with Pete in the stationery business and the two couples often went out together for dinner. Emma was very fond of them, but wasn’t in the mood for being sociable. She wanted to snuggle up with Pete and maybe, just maybe, talk to him about the whole baby thing.

‘Why’s Neil coming?’ she asked.

‘He was at the match today and Mike asked him along. Seems that some of Janine’s single friends will be there and you know Neil, mention single females and he’s drooling to be asked.’

‘Mention single chimpanzees and Neil’s drooling,’ Emma pointed out. ‘And you wanted to fix him up with Leonie?’

‘I don’t know what she’s like,’ protested Pete. ‘They might be perfect together.’

Regretting being so grumpy about the night out, Emma patted her husband’s denim-clad bum fondly. ‘No, darling, perfect is you and me. Now tell me: did you eat any of the beautiful home-cooked meals I left in the freezer for you, or did you plough all your wages into the frozen foods section of the supermarket?’

The Coachman’s was buzzing with a Saturday evening crowd when Pete and Emma pushed their way through to the corner where Mike and Janine were holding court.

‘Hiya, guys,’ roared Mike, getting up off his barstool to give it to Emma. ‘Sit in beside Janine. She’s giving out yards to me because it’s her birthday and we’ve been talking footie all night.’

Janine was everything Emma was not. Like a modern Gina Lollobrigida, she had curves in all the right places and favoured sex goddess eyeliner, vermilion lips and clothes from Morgan which she probably had to be sewn into. She and Emma got on like a house on fire, having the same sense of humour and problems with families. Although, in Janine’s case, her mother was the domineering one, ruling her family with an iron fist in a floral oven glove. They’d spent many companionable hours discussing home life while their respective spouses discussed the shocking performance at Shelbourne Park the previous day.

‘Welcome back,’ she said now, planting a pout of Mac’s Ruby Woo lipstick on Emma’s cheek. ‘Tell me everything about your holiday. Was it wonderful?’

It was closing time when they finally left, Janine leading the way because otherwise the boys would never go home, she declared. As Pete had been smiling at Emma all evening, whispering into her ear that he’d missed her and was going to do all sorts of erotic things to her when they got home, she didn’t think she’d have any trouble getting Pete to leave the pub.

‘I’m shattered and if I don’t get to bed soon, I’ll collapse,’ Janine announced as they stood in the pub hallway waiting for the men to make their way through the crowds. ‘We had such a mad day yesterday, Em. Mike’s sister was having her baby christened and it turned into an almighty party.’

Beside her, Emma stiffened. Another baby; Jesus, was there no escaping this?

‘Honestly, you want to hear Mike’s mother when she’s got a few drinks in her. She’s delirious about being a granny for the first time and she was dropping hints like bricks about me and Mike.’ Janine chuckled at the very idea, oblivious to how quiet Emma had gone. She rooted in her handbag and dragged out a Polaroid photo of a smiling baby with huge eyes and not a scrap of hair.

Emma took the photo and made all the right noises as she looked at it. What a beautiful baby, she thought, longing and misery building up inside her. Why, oh why couldn’t it be hers?

‘It’s a lovely baby, don’t get me wrong, but God, the mess! That child is only two months old and to bring him anywhere, you need a vanload of stuff. Bottles, nappies, pushchairs! Get off!’ she squealed as Mike finally caught up with them and grabbed her from behind. ‘I thought you’d be too shagged after today for anything kinky,’ she laughed.

‘How could he be too shagged?’ demanded Pete with a glint in his eye. ‘He did nothing on the pitch, failed to score twice and nearly fell asleep when he was marking the other team’s winger. He’ll have loads of energy!’

They went their separate ways, clambering into taxis and arranging to phone each other during the week. Emma knew she was being very quiet on the way home, but she couldn’t help it. All the fun had gone out of the evening thanks to Janine’s comments. Someone else with a baby. Mike’s sister was only a year or so younger than Mike, which made her around twenty-nine. Younger than Emma. It killed her when women who were younger got pregnant. Was that what women felt years ago when their younger sisters got married before them? Being older and left on the shelf was supposed to be some sort of shame. Now the shame was being childless when girls younger than you were dropping babies like rabbits.

At home, Emma climbed the stairs slowly, still in her baby dreamworld. She was almost surprised when Pete didn’t go into the bathroom to brush his teeth but instead pulled her down on to their bed, kissing her passionately. It wasn’t his fault, she thought blankly as she let him unbutton her blue shirt. He was telling her he adored her but his words seemed to roll off her.

They’d made such wonderful love in the beginning, she remembered. Neither of them had been exactly experienced – well, Emma didn’t count the year dating her first teenage boyfriend as experience. But they’d both taken to the concept of fun in bed like fish to water. Her sister Kirsten had jokingly given them a Joy of Sex book as a secret engagement present, and they’d gone through the whole thing from beginning to end, never quite getting the hang of some of the more athletic positions.

But it was changed now. Emma never bought strawberries or chocolate buttons for sexy games in bed; she hadn’t purchased any Body Shop massage oil in months. All sex had become trying-for-a-baby sex. Pete didn’t appear to notice this change. He still enjoyed himself and did his best to make Emma enjoy herself too. But he didn’t know that the passionate moments which used to give her so much pleasure no longer transported her into a world of erotic bliss.

Instead, she was willing each sperm to swim wildly up her cervix, to breach the tiny opening and emerge like a brave warrior into the fallopian tubes in search of her all-precious eggs. While Pete was groaning in sexual frenzy, Emma was on an incredible journey, like a documentary camera filming groundbreaking footage inside a woman’s uterus, watching the miracle of conception. Sexual pleasure came a poor second to the thrill of conception in Emma’s book.

And The Joy of Sex no longer gave her the thrill that Annabel Karmel’s toddler babyfoods book did. Hidden at the back of her wardrobe, her nest of baby books gave her solace and comfort. Like the few shameful baby things she’d bought on one trip to Mothercare. She’d felt so guilty even going in there, as if she had the word ‘impostor’ tattooed on her forehead. People would know she wasn’t a mother; only experienced women could tell which sort of bootees you should buy for a newborn. She’d planned to say she was buying a present for a friend if any nosy shop assistant noticed her inexperienced fingering of tiny garments. But nobody had come near her, so she’d borne away the small pink velour dress with pride. You couldn’t buy baby clothes and not need them, could you? God wouldn’t do that to a person. She would need them, of course she would. Maybe not yet but someday, soon.

On Sunday morning, she rang Leonie to say hello. She didn’t know why she had this compulsion to talk to Leonie, but she did. There was something comforting about Leonie, and there was the added bonus that she and Hannah knew how Emma felt deep-down about her desire for a child. There was no need to bullshit with people who knew your heart’s desires.

‘Emma!’ Leonie said, sounding delighted to hear from her. ‘How are you, my love?’

Emma gasped and let out a little sob. ‘Terrible, Leonie. That’s why I’m ringing you. I’m a mess, I’m sorry, I’ll go…’

Leonie interrupted her: ‘Don’t you dare hang up, you mad thing. It’s always depressing to come home and discover everything is exactly the same as it was before. You half expect that the world will have caught up with your renewed sense of purpose and, of course, it hasn’t. Is it the baby?’ she asked softly.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing today?’

Emma shook her head and then, realizing Leonie couldn’t see her, said: ‘I don’t know. Nothing really. We’ll probably go to the cinema tonight and I should spend today sorting out the house and the washing.’

‘So you and Pete have nothing planned? Well, will he mind if I steal you away for an hour?’

‘No.’

‘That’s a deal, then,’ Leonie said firmly. ‘I’ll phone Hannah and see if she’s free. I’ll hop in the car and be with you in an hour, OK?’

‘OK,’ Emma said tremulously.

‘Wait a moment and I’ll phone you back.’

Hannah didn’t answer the phone until the fifth ring. ‘I was vacuuming,’ she explained to Leonie. ‘I’ve been up since eight and, as the place was a disaster, I’ve cleaned everything, done the kitchen cupboards and most of the hand washing.’

Leonie grinned. ‘Will you come and do my house next?’ she joked. ‘All I’ve done this morning is walk Penny and toy with the idea of unpacking my suitcase. I’m phoning because Emma rang and she sounds very down. I suggested meeting in an hour for a quick coffee. Are you game?’

‘Yes, you can come here,’ Hannah suggested. ‘The place is clean now.’

‘As in, it was a tip in the first place?’ teased Leonie.

‘Well, it was a bit…’ started Hannah until she realized she was being neurotically houseproud and Leonie was teasing her. ‘Bitch. You bring the biscuits and I’ll have the coffee perking, right?’

Leonie got directions, then phoned Emma with them and arranged to meet in an hour.

‘Pete, love, I’m just popping out for a few hours,’ Emma called to her husband who was engrossed in the Sunday papers in the kitchen. ‘I’ve got a book of Leonie’s and I have to give it back to her, so we’re meeting for a coffee.’ She didn’t want to say she was meeting the girls because she needed the moral support they provided her with. It seemed traitorous to seek comfort from them instead of from Pete, but she couldn’t tell him how she felt. Not yet.

Hannah’s flat was just like her: perfectly elegant with not a caramel velvet cushion out of place. After hugging each other delightedly, Emma and Leonie prowled around the small living room, admiring the modern fireplace with the fat cream candles in their cast-iron holders and the arrangement of cacti in a gravel-filled pot on the small glass-topped coffee table. Everything was airy and contemporary, from the muslin curtains draped over a cast-iron pole to the oatmeal throws Hannah had arranged carefully over her two elderly armchairs. Beautiful black-and-white photos of city streets hung in silver frames on the cream wall, but there were no family photos, no pictures of a smiling Hannah with other members of her family, Leonie noticed. It was as if she’d divorced herself from her past and used arty photos from other people’s lives to hide the fact.

‘I’m so sorry about the coffee,’ Hannah apologized for about the fifth time, as she came into the room with three fat yellow ceramic cups on big saucers. She’d been horrified when she went to make the coffee to discover that she only had instant. She loved it, but it wasn’t polite to serve instant, was it? She hated feeling insecure about things like that. At home, they’d only ever drunk tea and their guests had never been what you’d describe as polite society. It was when she was entertaining that Hannah really felt her lack of understanding for things like how to hold a fork or how to introduce people to each other. She longed to be blasé about these matters, longed to know instinctively instead of always carefully watching other people for hints.

‘Stop fussing about the coffee,’ Leonie said, waving a hand at her. ‘Far from percolated coffee we were all reared. We never have real coffee at home or I’d be permanently broke. Danny loves it and uses up a pound in a week.’

‘Instant is perfect,’ Emma added. ‘Your flat is so pretty. You really know how to create a lovely atmosphere. I’d never know how to make those muslin curtains drape.’

‘Penny would have them dragged off the pole in a week because she loves going in behind the curtains to sulk,’ Leonie said with a laugh. ‘That’s probably where she is right now, actually, sulking with me. She was thrilled when I got home last night but she wouldn’t let me out of her sight all morning, convinced I was going to leave her. She howled when she saw me putting on my good coat.’

‘How’s poor Clover?’ asked Hannah. ‘Traumatized from the cattery?’

Leonie nodded guiltily. ‘As soon as I got her home, she shot into Danny’s room and hasn’t come out since. She’s probably under the duvet, shivering and covering it with cat hairs. Herman is fine, though. Mum’s cats didn’t manage to terrorize him for once. In fact, if anything, he’s got fat.’

Emma laughed. ‘I think Pete must have been eating the same as Herman,’ she said. ‘He survived on chips and pizza all week and I swear he’s put on a few pounds. We were all teasing him about it in the pub.’ Her face darkened. ‘That’s why I was such an idiot on the phone to you earlier,’ she said to Leonie. ‘Not because of Pete, but…’ she sighed. ‘We were in the pub with our friends Mike and Janine, and she began to tell me about Mike’s sister who’s had a baby and, I don’t know, I went to pieces. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Mention the word “baby” and I become this blubbering fool.’

She took a scalding sip of coffee. It seemed normal to talk about it here. At home, she’d felt as if she was on the verge of a breakdown and wondered if Pete or anyone else would think her unhinged if she said how miserable she felt. But Hannah and Leonie thought it was perfectly natural to talk about your feelings. They seemed to understand how easy it was to have your emotions upended by something.

‘Of course it’s not ridiculous,’ Hannah said kindly. ‘I’m like that with Harry. One minute, I’m on top of the world and the next, I see someone walking down the street wearing a jacket like his and I get so freaked out that I don’t know if I’m furious or miserable. I start having fantasies about what I’d say to him if I ever saw him again and what sort of garden pruning device I’d use on him…’

Emma giggled. ‘I have baby fantasies,’ she admitted. ‘I’m in the car and I imagine what it must be like to be driving around with the baby in the back, talking to her and telling her what we’re going to do. You know, “Mummy’s bringing you to the shops to buy you some lovely new clothes and then we’re going to the park for a big walk to look at the ducks.”‘ She’d never told anyone that before. It was too private.

Leonie patted her arm. ‘You can tell us anything, Em,’ she said simply, as if she’d known what Emma was thinking. ‘That’s what friends are for. Maybe because we’re new friends and don’t have all sorts of histories with each other, we can accept each other for what we really are.’

Emma nodded. ‘I know. It’s great, isn’t it?’

The hour stretched to an hour and a half. More coffee was needed and Emma insisted she make it. ‘If we’re going to be proper friends, then you can’t be waiting on us like a couple of guests,’ she told Hannah. ‘My God,’ she said moments later. ‘Your kitchen is spotless. Are you sure you aren’t related to my mother? She’d adore you.’

Hannah stuck on a Harry Connick Jnr CD and they all listened to his mellow voice as they went through the rest of the croissants Leonie had brought.

‘He’s a fine thing, Harry,’ Emma said as Harry sang ‘It Had To Be You’ in his own special way.

‘Yeah, but his name ruins it,’ laughed Hannah. ‘Anyway, I’ve gone off dark men. My Harry was dark-haired, so I think I’ll go for blonds from now on.’

‘Ooh, like who?’ asked Leonie. ‘Describe him to us, your fantasy man.’

Sitting on an armchair, Hannah hugged her knees to her chest and contemplated him: ‘Tall, because I like wearing high heels and I hate men who are smaller than me. Muscular, definitely, and with blue eyes, like yours, Leonie; piercing blue to gaze into my soul. Strong bones and wonderful hands for touching me all over. And golden, honeyed skin and hair to match.’

‘That’s Robert Redford you’re talking about,’ Leonie warned, ‘and he’s mine. If he turns up on your doorstep, you are not to lay a hand on him. Or our friendship will be over.’

‘You have to think of your own fantasy man,’ objected Hannah. ‘You can’t just duplicate mine.’

‘OK, OK.’ Leonie loved this game. She played it all the time herself, picturing the man who’d rescue her from singledom. ‘Sorry, Hannah, I’m not copying you, but he has to be tall and strong, really. Otherwise he’ll never be able to carry me over the threshold without rupturing some vital bit. And,’ she giggled, ‘he’ll need all his vital bits in perfect working order. Let’s see…He’s got to be over forty and I think I fancy dark men, definitely, but he can have greying temples. That’s very sexy, distinguished. You can see yourself running your fingers through the grey bits…’

‘You can’t have sex with him until you’ve finished describing him,’ teased Hannah.

‘Dark eyes and a Kirk Douglas chin.’

‘What’s that?’ Emma asked, puzzled.

‘With a dent in it,’ Leonie answered. ‘I used to watch all those old movies when I was a kid and I fancied Kirk something rotten. There was one pirate movie he was in and I dreamed about being the girl in it for months. Oh yes, he has to be filthy rich and love children, animals and women who never stick to their diet. Your turn, Em.’

Emma smiled shyly. ‘I know you’ll think I’m daft, but Pete is my fantasy man. He’s not terribly tall and he’s not muscular, although he’s fit. He’s going bald but I adore him. He’s it’.

Hannah and Leonie smiled at her affectionately. ‘That’s wonderful,’ Hannah said.

‘True love,’ Leonie added. ‘You are lucky, you know.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hannah had been having a wonderful day until she met the postman when she was on her way back to her front door that evening. He didn’t say anything rude or jokingly ask her if she’d joined a convent in her stark grey jacket, long matching skirt, and white shirt, which he’d said one day he met her as she was coming back from a job interview. No, he simply shoved a bunch of letters into the letterbox of the open front door, and the rest of the evening was kaput. Hannah bent to pick them up and realized that two were for her, one in Harry’s writing.

His familiar sloping scrawl was instantly recognizable. He never could do joined up writing, they used to joke. Well ha, bloody, ha! she snarled now. It wasn’t cute or even amusing. It was plain stupid. Imagine a thirty-six-year-old man who couldn’t write properly. She dumped the rest of the letters on the hall table for the other residents and rushed in, shaking her hair to get rid of the light drizzle that had appeared from nowhere. Up till then, it had been a great day.

Her first day working in Dwyer, Dwyer & James estate agent’s and she’d arrived early. Parking the car in a space opposite the branch, she sat there for a few moments and began to breathe deeply. She filled her lungs with air, held it and then exhaled slowly. It was a wonderful way of preparing yourself for the day, she found. Somebody tapped on her window and Hannah leapt in her seat. The window was misted up so she instinctively rubbed it to see who was looking in. A strange woman was smiling in at her. Harmless looking, Hannah felt, noticing the good raincoat, pleasant middle-aged face and pearl necklace above a pink pussy-cat bow blouse, but still strange. She rolled down the window.

‘Yes?’

‘You must be Hannah. I’m Gillian from Dwyer, Dwyer & James. I spotted you from the newsagent’s and thought you were wondering if you should park there or not. But you can.’

‘That’s kind of you,’ Hannah answered politely, getting out of the car and thinking that not a lot must happen in Dun Laoghaire if people spent their time peering out of the newsagent’s window looking out for the new employees.

‘You looked lost in thought…’ said the woman helpfully.

‘Just wondering where to park,’ Hannah lied blithely. She wasn’t about to tell this person that she never lost a moment’s sleep about parking and was sitting there because she was nervous about this new job and needed time to put on her cool, calm façade. Letting people know about your personal life was only asking for trouble, she’d decided. How could she operate as the cool and collected Ms Campbell if the staff knew how she had to calm herself down with yoga breathing? She couldn’t, that was the simple answer.

Two hours later, Hannah knew that Gillian had been on reception for years and worked part-time for the senior Mr Dwyer, a kindly faced man who could be seen through his glass-fronted office reading a huge batch of morning papers and getting Gillian to say he wasn’t in to phone callers.

‘The reception is so busy that I’d prefer to do just one job, looking after Mr Dwyer,’ Gillian whispered, as if Mr Dwyer required a lot of looking after.

Hannah also knew that the ladies’ toilet had an extractor fan problem (recounted in a whisper by Gillian), that the young Steve Shaw would try and chat her up as soon as he saw her even though he was only back from his honeymoon, and that Donna Nelson, the firm’s newest senior agent, was a single mother, ‘although she seems like a nice enough girl,’ Gillian sniffed, as if single motherdom and niceness were mutually exclusive. Hannah said nothing.

Gillian herself had back problems: ‘My chiropractor says I shouldn’t work, but what would I do with myself at home?’ she tittered. Hannah forbore to suggest, ‘Contribute to a gossip column?’ She was married to Leonard, had one son, a deeply unsuitable daughter-in-law, and a budgie named Clementine, who was a boy.

Hannah, who was supposed to be learning the intricacies of the firm’s reception with Gillian as her guide, would have preferred to hear more about dealing with clients and which agents dealt with which areas, and less about how clever Clementine was and what he could do with his mirror. It was soon clear that Gillian, having given so much of herself, was now looking for payback from Hannah in the form of her life story.

Hannah hadn’t divulged one bit of personal information all morning, despite Gillian’s avalanche of intimate chat. Neither had Hannah mentioned that her job was actually going to be that of office manager but that she’d been asked to start on reception as a way of learning more about the firm. One of her first jobs as office manager would be to train the new receptionist starting the following week. Judging by how Gillian appeared to enjoy her lofty position as Mr Dwyer’s assistant, she wouldn’t be pleased to find Hannah was actually her senior in the company structure. She’d find out soon enough.

‘Are you married?’ Gillian asked, pale eyes twinkling in her rosy face, discreet pearl earrings catching the light. She was a monster, Hannah decided. A monster who traded in stories of human misery and who needed Hannah’s story to add to her collection of scalps.

‘Or engaged…?’

Hannah hadn’t grown up in a remote western town where disapproving gossip was the lifeblood of half the residents for nothing.

‘Neither,’ she said bluntly. Then she gazed coolly at Gillian, holding the other woman’s eyes for at least thirty seconds until Gillian looked away uncomfortably.

She’d got the message, Hannah decided.

‘I’ll make us some tea,’ Hannah said warmly. It was vital not to upset Gillian, after all. Just to let her see that Hannah would not be revealing any delicate personal details for the office bulletin board.

It was nearly lunchtime before David James, who had interviewed Hannah in the firm’s city-centre office for the job, arrived. ‘He’s been busy with the Dawson Street office but he still drops in here from time to time,’ Gillian revealed, searching for her frosted pink lipstick when Mr James’s Jag pulled up outside the door.

He doesn’t drop in often enough, Hannah felt, looking around the rather run-down premises which was a total contrast to the stylish Dawson Street branch. There, the minimalist look ruled with architect-designed furniture, modern prints on the walls and an air of discreet wealth simmered gently in the background.

The Dun Laoghaire branch of Dwyer, Dwyer & James looked like somebody’s idea of an elegant office circa 1970. The walls were coffee-coloured, the seats for clients were the sort of low squashy things fashionable when Charlie’s Angels were famous the first time, and big brown felt screens divided up the private bits of the office from the public bits. The address was prestigious but the office was a shambles.

In between Gillian’s monologues, Hannah had been wondering whether she’d made a huge and hideous mistake in giving up her nice job for this place. Dwyer, Dwyer & James were a big, powerful firm and she’d felt it was a step upwards to work for them as office manager. But this branch was like the office that time forgot.

David James, tall, strongly built and with the sort of commanding presence that reduced the place to silence, walked in, shook hands with Hannah, said he hoped she was settling in and asked to see her in the back office. He threw a raincoat on to the back of a chair and pulled off his suit jacket to reveal muscular shoulders straining under a French blue shirt. He was quite handsome really, she realized. She hadn’t noticed it at her interview; she’d been too nervous. But there was something attractive about that broad, strong-boned face and the sleek salt-and-pepper hair. He was probably in his early forties, although the lines around his narrow eyes made him appear slightly older. Immaculate in his expensive clothes, he somehow looked as if he’d be just as at home wielding an axe to chop wood in the wilderness as wielding a Mont Blanc pen in a swish office. He certainly had the colour of someone who liked outdoor pursuits. Not a man to mess with.

‘Have you spoken to my partner, Andrew Dwyer, yet?’ he asked, settling himself into a big chair, not looking at her as his eyes raked over the papers on the desk that required his attention.

‘No. Gillian has been filling me in,’ Hannah said.

A flash of brief understanding passed between them, David’s dark eyes glinting.

‘Ah, Gillian, yes,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not really suitable for Gillian to be doing two jobs. That’s why I’ve hired you. I’m sure you’re wondering what you’ve done, coming from the Triumph Hotel to this place.’

That’s exactly what Hannah had been thinking but she was too clever to show it. She kept her face carefully blank.

‘This was our first premises and it’s ten years since I left,’ he said.

Hannah was surprised. Listening to Gillian, you’d have thought Mr James had been gone from Dun Laoghaire for a mere six months.

‘My nephew Michael set up the Howth office eight years ago and he was due to come back here to take over but personal reasons prevented him doing it. I didn’t have the time to sort this place out. Things have gone downhill here recently since the other Mr Dwyer died. There’ll be a lot of changes and I thought we needed a good manager for the place. I need someone who can get on with the existing staff and be able to work with any new ones. That’s why I hired you. I know you’re a hard worker and I like your style, Hannah.

‘We never had an office manager before. Gillian ran the office when it was a small concern, but we’ve barely been ticking over for a long time. We need a proper office manager, someone who can keep us running smoothly, getting auction brochures printed, etc. From the point of view of security, we need someone who is always aware of where the agents are. When you have people on their own showing houses, you have to be security conscious. I want the female agents to be contacted every hour to make sure they’re safe. I’m very confident that you can do it.’

‘Thanks,’ she said briskly.

‘Now, if Donna Nelson’s back, perhaps you could send her in. I need to have a talk with her.’

Hannah was glad she was working directly with David James. Direct and blunt, he clearly didn’t waste any time on chatting. He was just the sort of person Hannah enjoyed working for. With someone like him, there’d be no need for extraneous conversations about the state of the weather or how strong the office coffee was.

Gillian was dying to know how she’d got on.

‘Isn’t Mr James a pet,’ she sighed. ‘His marriage broke up and he’s never really got over it. I mean, he went out with a few women, but nothing worked out. I think he’s lonely, don’t you sense it too?’

What Hannah sensed was that Gillian would have given poor hubbie Leonard and the talented Clementine the push if she could have comforted Mr James in a very unplatonic way.

By close of business, she’d met all the firm’s agents and had liked Donna Nelson best of all. A rather chic woman with a dark bob, navy suit and an efficient air, she was obviously very wary of Gillian and had greeted Hannah with a guarded smile that said, She’s been telling you all about me, hasn’t she?

Hannah responded with her warmest smile and said pleasantly: ‘Perhaps we could have a chat during the week and you can tell me how you’d like your calls handled.’

‘That would be great,’ Donna said, looking pleased. Probably sick and tired of Gillian’s sharp manner with clients, she was relieved to find someone who knew how to answer a phone without cutting the nose off someone.

Business didn’t appear to be brisk, but Gillian’s put-on phone voice, as frosty as her lipstick, wouldn’t have enticed cold callers to put their homes for sale through Dwyers.

One caller looking for Donna received a particularly sharp remark: ‘If she has time, she’ll get back to you.’

‘Personal call,’ Gillian said disapprovingly, hanging up.

Hannah said nothing again but vowed that when she had sole charge of the office, things would be vastly different. No receptionist she’d train would ever be so rude on the phone.

David James had chatted to her briefly before he left the office that afternoon, balancing his big frame awkwardly on the edge of her desk.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.

Beside her, Hannah could feel Gillian sitting up straight in her office chair, hoping to be noticed.

‘Fine. I think I’ll have the hang of it in a few days, although it’s easy enough to lose calls on this switchboard. The one in the Triumph was more modern and more efficient,’ she said frankly.

This time, she could sense Gillian bridling with shock that a new employee had dared say such a thing to the boss, but David James merely nodded.

‘We’ll talk about it,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’

‘You’re the forward madam, I’ll say that for you,’ sniffed Gillian when he was gone.

‘You said exactly the same thing about the switchboard earlier,’ Hannah reminded her gently. ‘I was merely telling him.’

‘Mr James doesn’t want to be bothered with things like that,’ hissed Gillian.

Hannah said nothing.

She’d felt pleased as she drove home that evening, pleased that she had made the right choice in moving jobs and confident that she’d do well there. Bloody Harry and his ill-timed letter had ruined that sense of pleasure.

She went into her flat, threw her coat on the hanger and opened the letter.

Dear Hannah,

How’s it going, babe? Hope you’ve taken over the entire hotel business in Dublin by now. Knowing you, you have.

I’m still trekking around South America. Just spent a few weeks in BA (that’s Buenos Aires to you, babes).

‘Babes!’ she snarled, grinding her teeth fiercely. How bloody dare he call her ‘babes’?

I’ve been travelling with some guys and we’re planning another month here before we go to Chile…

She read lines and lines of chatter about odd-jobbing as a tourist guide and how he’d got a few shifts in an English-language newspaper the previous month. It was all surface stuff; nothing personal, no hint as to why he was writing to her for the first time in a year. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted a letter. Not now, anyway. In the first month after he’d left, she’d have killed someone for any news of Harry. Just a postcard or a phone call to say he missed her and wished he hadn’t left. If he’d phoned to beg her to visit him, she’d have downed tools and hopped on the first plane to Rio de Janeiro. It was immaterial that she’d thrown him out of the flat when he first announced that he was leaving her to travel abroad, immaterial that she’d roared at him for being a spineless coward who was terrified of commitment and that she never wanted to see or hear from him again. Ever. Because she missed him so much.

And for the first time in her life, Hannah had discovered that when you adored someone and missed them so badly you woke up in the middle of the night screaming out their name, you still wanted them back, no matter what they’d done or said.

Without even reading the final page, Hannah folded the letter carefully and stuck it in a drawer in the kitchen. She didn’t want to think about Harry. She didn’t want to remember what he even looked like…

Eleven years ago, he’d been attractive in a studenty way. Dark hair that reached his collar and curled madly when it got wet; bluey grey eyes that turned down at the corners and made him look constantly forlorn, and that wide, mobile mouth that could smile so mischievously. He always wore big jackets and baggy trousers that looked two sizes too big for him. But then, that was part of the charm of Harry Spender: his little boy qualities made women want to mother him.

Hannah had mothered him for ten long years, from the moment they’d met in McDonald’s and he’d spilt his milkshake all over the uniform she wore as a beauty counter assistant in Brown Thomas.

‘OhmiGod, I’m so sorry, please let me help you clean it off,’ he’d said, his face a picture of innocent remorse as they both stared at the remains of a strawberry shake dripping steadily off Hannah and on to the floor.

And she’d gone with him in the direction of the toilets, not even nervous about going off with a strange man, even when he came into the ladies’ with her and insisted on using loo paper to soak the shake off.

She should have refused him when he asked her out for a drink that evening. But then, Hannah was her mother’s daughter and, at the age of twenty-seven, she was still young enough to be impressed by someone who actually wrote for the Evening Press.

At home in Connemara, the Campbell family had only ever read two newspapers: the local paper the Western People and the Sunday Press. She’d grown up with it, had watched her mother put the previous week’s paper at the bottom of the chickens’ coop when they were hatched under the kitchen table; had laid it on the floor so that the men coming home from working on the farm wouldn’t muddy the floor with their filthy boots. To go out with someone who worked for the same group, well!

Of course, when she finally met Harry, court reporter extraordinaire, Hannah’s mother hadn’t been that impressed by him despite his job. But it was too late then. Hannah loved him and could already see herself walking down the aisle with him, radiant in white something or other, smiling for the official photo which would appear in that Sunday’s paper. Together for richer for poorer, for better for worse. Hannah loved that idea, the notion of stability, security.

Marriage hadn’t been on Harry’s mind. ‘I’m a free spirit, Hannah, you’ve always known that: I thought that’s what you liked about me,’ he’d said as she stared at him slack-jawed the day he told her about South America.

‘Yes, but up till now your version of being a free spirit meant going to music festivals, buying Jimi Hendrix albums and not paying the phone bill until they threaten to cut us off!’ she shrieked, when she finally found her voice.

Harry shrugged. ‘I’m not getting any younger,’ he said. He was the same age as Hannah. ‘I don’t want to waste my life. This trip is just what I’ve been looking for. I’ve been stagnating, Hannah. We both have.’

That was when she picked up his leather jacket and threw it out the front door. ‘Leave!’ she yelled. ‘Leave now, before you waste any more of your precious life. I’m so sorry I was a waste of time and contributed to your stagnation.’

She hadn’t seen or heard from him since. He’d left there and then, and slipped back in to pack up his stuff the following day when she wasn’t at home. Rage and fury had possessed Hannah as soon as he was gone, and she’d immediately moved out of the flat they’d shared into another smaller, nicer place, using their deposit money to buy a new bed and sofa. There was no way she was sleeping on the bed she’d shared with that bastard. If he wanted his share of the money back, he could sue her. He already owed her ten years of her life, not to mention all the cash she’d loaned him over the years because he frittered his salary away.

For a year, nothing. And now, out of the blue, came a letter. On the first day of her new job, Hannah sat for a moment at her kitchen table, staring into space. Then she wrenched open the drawer and read the rest of the letter.

Two paragraphs from the end, Harry got to the point: ‘I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m writing, Hannah. But you can’t cut someone out of your life when you’ve spent ten years with them.’ Oh yes you can, she hissed at the letter.

I’m coming home in a few months and I’d love to see you. I’ve kept in touch with what you’re up to, thanks to Mitch. He gave me your new address.

Damn Mitch, cursed Hannah. One of Harry’s old colleagues, she’d told him where she was living when they’d bumped into each other in the supermarket a few months ago.

I’d love to see you, Hannah, although I’m not sure if you’d want to see me. I’d understand it, but I hope you don’t still feel bitter.

Bitter! Bitter wasn’t the word. Toxic with rage fitted the bill much better, Hannah fumed.

I think about you a lot and feel that we went through so much we’ve got unfinished business between us. If you’re keen, you can e-mail me. Bye, Harry.

His e-mail address was at the bottom but Hannah barely looked at it. She felt dizzy with temper, absolutely straight-up furious. How could he? Just when she was sorting her life out, how dare he try and weasel his way back in. See him again? She’d rather remove her own appendix without an anaesthetic.

The offices of KrisisKids were silent and empty at eight fifteen on Monday morning when Emma let herself into her office and surveyed it with pleasure. Small, really only a cubby-hole, it was plain, simple, and she loved it. The walls were the same restful lemon as the rest of the office, the furniture was blonde wood and the plants that grew luxuriantly on top of her four filing cabinets flourished in the natural light from the huge picture window. Giant posters covered the walls telling visitors to WATCH THE CHILDREN – YOU MIGHT BE THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN HELP, and giving their phoneline number. Emma had taken over running the phoneline a year ago and had worked hard to develop it from a service which ran during office hours into one which was open round the clock. Staffing a phoneline for such hours was hugely expensive and problematic. But Emma now had a vast rota of qualified counsellors and, although there were times when gremlins got into the system and four people phoned in sick at the same time, it was a big success. Thanks to the phoneline, KrisisKids now received a large state grant and, thanks to a lot of media coverage, the contributions from the public were increasing.

Seeing the phoneline become a success was very rewarding, but Emma often felt it was tragic that there was a need for such a service in the first place. The grainy black-and-white photo of a crying boy on the poster was a set-up. As far as Emma knew, the boy was a happy child model whom the advertising agency had picked because he was small for his age. But the image was powerful nevertheless. His sad eyes seemed to follow Emma around the office, reminding her of how badly people could treat children.

It was ironic, she always thought: she, who was childless, worked in an industry where children were the primary focus.

Emma’s desk was just as pristine as she’d left it a week previously: not one piece of paper marred the gleaming wood, her photo of Pete sat at a perfect right angle to her computer monitor, and the painted wooden box she kept her paper clips in was in its usual position beside the phone. Only her overflowing in-tray was evidence that she’d been on holiday. Files, letters and bits of crinkly photocopy paper sat in a perilous heap, towering over the edges of the plastic tray.

‘Lovely holiday?’ enquired Colin Mulhall, appearing out of nowhere and perching on the edge of Emma’s desk, eyes gleaming inquisitively.

The publicity department second-in-command and office gossip, twenty-something Colin was ruthless in his pursuit of personal details. Emma often felt that MI5 had missed out by not signing Colin up for something. He mightn’t have been able to speak Russian or Iraqi or even basic English, come to that, but his intelligence-gathering skills were second to none. He couldn’t type a press release without hitting the computer spell check at least four times to see if he’d spelled everything right, but if you wanted to know why the new girl in accounts kept coming in with red eyes every morning, Colin was the only man for the job. Except that Emma never wanted to know the gossip. It wasn’t her scene. Being brought up by a mother who lived and breathed gossip had instilled in Emma a loathing for dishing dirt about other people. If the girl in accounts had eight lovers, a drug habit and a fetish for wearing fishnet stockings and no knickers, Emma didn’t want to know about it.

‘Fair enough,’ said Finn Harrison, the charity’s press officer and Colin’s boss, who loved a bit of gossip himself but respected Emma’s decision not to get involved.

‘I don’t know why she’s working for a charity when she’s not the least bit charitable and hasn’t the slightest interest in normal people. She obviously thinks she’s above hearing about our humdrum lives,’ Colin said darkly about Emma. He resented her managerial position. She was his superior and it rankled. He, Colin, should have been third in command to Edward Richards, not the prim Emma Sheridan. ‘Miss Smug with her perfect husband and perfect figure. I bet she has some dark secret. She’s probably having it off with the boss. Her door is always closed. Forward planning meetings, my backside.’ Under the circumstances, Colin and Emma were not best pals. Emma avoided the photocopier when Colin was laboriously copying out his badly typed press releases. But, because as third in command to the MD Emma had access to lots of juicy, top-secret information, Colin was always trying to engage her in friendly conversation.

This couldn’t be it, Emma thought suspiciously. Colin had a tale to tell.

‘You’ll never guess,’ Colin said now, preening ever so slightly in his ridiculous bow-tie (his trademark, he called it) and jaunty yellow shirt that did nothing for his sallow complexion.

‘You’re right, I probably won’t,’ Emma replied.

Colin’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Edward is bringing in an outside PR firm to help with the phoneline. He doesn’t think we’re getting enough good press.’

‘That’s crazy, it’s been working wonderfully,’ Emma shot out. ‘I can’t believe he’s thinking of that without consulting me.’ Suddenly aware that she’d said too much, she clammed up. ‘I better get some work done, Colin,’ she said brightly. ‘Get rid of those holiday cobwebs.’

‘Egypt, was it?’ Colin enquired, knowing he was being dismissed but not wanting to leave yet. ‘Did Pete enjoy it?’

Emma couldn’t resist. She widened her eyes dramatically. ‘Pete didn’t go, Colin,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

Leaving an astonished Colin to interpret that bit of disinformation, Emma sorted through her post. At least having a bit of drama at work took her mind off the crises in her personal life.

CHAPTER EIGHT

From her seat near the escalator, Emma could see Kirsten striding along through the afternoon crowds in the shopping centre looking exactly what she was: wealthy, perkily pretty and utterly sure of herself. And she was only fifteen minutes late, which had to be a record, Emma thought, watching her sister’s progress through the centre, her step as confident as a supermodel. She looked amazing, as usual. Kirsten’s hair, currently a rich chestnut crop, contrasted perfectly with the tiny butter-coloured suede jacket she wore over a tummy-skimming white T-shirt and faded blue jeans. Emma knew she’d have looked ridiculous in an outfit like that, but Kirsten carried it off with ease. People who knew Emma were always amazed to meet Kirsten purely because they looked so utterly different, like the before and after pictures in some glossy magazine feature.

‘I’d never have guessed you two were sisters,’ they’d gasp, staring at Kirsten, who was the picture of adorable modern chic beside deeply conservative and almost old-fashioned Emma. Kirsten looked at home in cute jewelled hairslides and bounced around in clunky contemporary shoes, while Emma wouldn’t dream of using anything other than plain kirby grips to hold her hair back and was a fan of loafers and nice court shoes.

But different hair, clothes and make-up aside, the two sisters actually had incredibly similar features. Both had the same long nose, pale amber-flecked eyes and thin lips. There the resemblance ended.

Kirsten’s irrepressible self-confidence gave her an impish beauty that Emma was convinced she’d never achieve. Emma waited until her sister was half-way up the escalator and began waving to attract her attention.

When Kirsten spotted her, she walked over slowly and sat down on the other seat with a sigh, rifling through her small Louis Vuitton handbag for her cigarettes. Like the square-cut emerald on her wedding-ring finger, the bag was genuine.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, as she always did when they met up. ‘I was on the phone to one of the girls on the committee and I couldn’t get rid of the stupid bitch. I knew you’d get a coffee and sit down if I was late.’ She lit up and inhaled deeply.

Emma couldn’t stop herself from looking reproving. She worried about her younger sister and wished she wouldn’t smoke.

‘They’re Silk Cut White, for God’s sake, Em,’ Kirsten said pre-emptively. ‘There’s so little nicotine in them you’d get cheekbones like Tina Turner sucking to get any hit at all.’ Kirsten grinned evilly. ‘Very useful practice for Patrick, all that sucking. Not,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘as if there’s much of that these days. I’m going to have to order some Viagra if he doesn’t perk up soon.’

‘You’re terrible, Kirsten,’ Emma said mildly. ‘What would poor Patrick think if he knew the things you told me about him? He’d die if he knew you discussed your sex life.’ She was fond of her solemn, hard-working brother-in-law and often wondered how the hell he and Kirsten had managed to stay married for four years without one of them ending up in the dock on murder charges.

‘I only tell you these things, Em,’ protested Kirsten, looking innocent. ‘I have to talk to someone or I’d go mad. It’s work, work, work all the time these days,’ she grumbled. ‘He never stops. We never have any fun any more.’

‘Well, perhaps if you went back to work, you wouldn’t be so bored,’ Emma retorted, more sharply than she’d intended.

‘I’m not going back to work and that’s final.’ Kirsten shuddered and pulled Emma’s empty coffee cup over to use as an ashtray as they were sitting in the no-smoking section. ‘I don’t need the money and I’m not cut out for work, Em. I hated that bloody job in the building society, all that getting up in the morning and sitting in the traffic to be yelled at when I got in for being late. Besides, Patrick likes having his dinner on the table when he comes home. I couldn’t do that and work, could I?’

‘Kirsten, you don’t cook. If it wasn’t for Marks & Spencer’s ready meals, poor Patrick would be a stick insect.’

‘Stop nagging,’ Kirsten said good-naturedly. ‘Will I get you another coffee before we start shopping?’

Over coffee, they discussed their mission: to buy a birthday present for their mother, who would be sixty the following Wednesday.

‘It has to be special,’ Emma said, ‘but I’ve racked my brains and I can’t come up with anything.’

‘I never know what to buy for Mum. Come on, let’s hustle.’ Kirsten stabbed out her third cigarette, got up and led the way to the down escalator. ‘She’s getting worse to buy things for. I asked her the other day if she’d used that beauty salon voucher I gave her for Christmas and she said, “What voucher?” I swear she’s losing her marbles.’

The nagging worry at the back of Emma’s subconscious suddenly leapt to the front of the mental queue. ‘What did you say?’

‘That she’s losing her marbles. Well, she is, Em. Before you all went to Egypt, I was on the phone to her and she asked me how Patrick’s parents were. I mean, Jesus, his father is dead two years. Do you think she’s on something that’s making her dopey? That’s got to be it. You’d need tranquillizers to live with Dad, after all, so I couldn’t blame her…’

As Kirsten chattered away, Emma made herself face up to the notion that had been rippling through her head like quicksilver for months: there was something wrong with her mother. Something wrong with her mind.

All that panicking when they’d been away, the way she’d clung on to her Egyptian currency and refused to hand it over when she was shopping, convinced she was being fiddled by the vendors. She kept trying to go into the wrong cabin, which Jimmy had found irritating. And the way she kept losing things – her glasses, the thread of the conversation. It wasn’t normal, Emma knew it.

‘I think you’re right,’ she said shakily.

‘Really?’ Kirsten said, sounding pleased and running a hand through her glossy hair. ‘I thought you preferred my hair blonde. Patrick loves this colour, says it’s very sexy…’

‘No, I mean about Mum. I think she is losing her marbles. What a horrible phrase, it’s so demeaning. What I mean is that she’s confused and acting strangely. That sounds like…’ Emma hesitated, not even wanting to say the word, ‘…senile dementia.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kirsten snapped. ‘She’s far too young for that. Old people get it, not Mum. Let’s not talk about it, right?’

Kirsten hated facing the harder side of life and as a child had often simply refused to talk about things which upset her, like her dreadful exam results and the scathing remarks her teachers made in her homework notebook about her disruptive behaviour in class.

‘I’m sorry, Kirsten,’ Emma said firmly, ‘we’ve got to talk about it. Not talking about it won’t make it go away. That’s like having a breast lump and not going to the doctor – the “If I don’t see it, it can’t hurt me” theory.’

‘I’d go to the doctor if I had a breast lump,’ Kirsten insisted.

‘So says the woman who refused to go to the dentist for three years.’

‘That’s different. Now come on, we’re running out of time, Em. We’ve got to buy something for Mum and I want to go into Mango first and see if they’ve any nice things in.’

Emma gave up and followed her sister into the clothes shop. There was no point in arguing with Kirsten when she’d made up her mind. Besides, she was probably right. Dementia was something old people got.

Kirsten strode off to where racks of tiny clothes hung, so Emma headed for the long, suitable-for-the-office skirt department. After a cursory look at some plain grey and black skirts that looked like all the other skirts in her wardrobe, she wandered back to where Kirsten was rifling through a rail of stretchy net tops that looked as if they wouldn’t fit an eight-year-old. Selecting two acid pink ones that would either look amazing or desperate with her hair colour, Kirsten mooched on to the next rail.

‘Aren’t these peachy!’ she said, focusing on skinny black trousers with a line of silver beading down each seam.

‘Try them on,’ Emma said mechanically, the way she’d done for years when they’d shopped as teenagers. Her role had been to hold the handbags and supply different sizes while Kirsten enraged the changing-room queue by spending at least half an hour in the cubicle, discarding things like Imelda Marcos on a shoe-buying frenzy.

‘Yes, I think I will try them. But I’ll just get a couple of other things. No point stripping off for two tops and a pair of trousers.’

As Kirsten scanned the rails with the narrowed eyes of an expert, Emma thought about their mother. She wished she could be like Kirsten and simply not confront problems, or just put them out of her mind. But she couldn’t. Something was wrong with Anne-Marie, she knew it. And she hoped – no, she prayed – it wasn’t senile dementia.

She’d read snippets about it, articles she’d half-scanned in women’s magazines in between fashion features and the problem pages. She’d never exactly been interested, but that curious desire to read about other people’s suffering, if only to thank your lucky stars it wasn’t happening to you, had meant she’d absorbed some information about the disease. A slow, insidious intruder, it crept into people’s minds and took over, making its presence known gradually with moments of forgetfulness, before leading up to…what, exactly? Emma wasn’t sure. Did people die from it?

Waiting outside the cubicle for Kirsten, she tried to put the whole thing out of her mind. Kirsten was right. Their mother was too young…wasn’t she?

‘Great Aunt Petra isn’t coming, is she?’ groaned Kirsten, looking at Emma’s rough table plan for their mother’s birthday dinner.

‘Of course she is,’ Emma said, emerging from basting the goose again, her face puce with heat and exertion. ‘She’s Dad’s only living aunt and he’d go mental if she wasn’t invited.’

‘She’s an unhinged bitch and everybody hates her,’ protested Kirsten. ‘If Dad wants to invite her to their bloody house, that’s his business. I don’t know why the rest of us have to put up with her.’

‘Yeah,’ snapped Emma, fed up with the lack of catering help Kirsten had provided since she’d arrived an hour previously with her hair newly blow-dried and no obvious intention of doing anything useful. ‘And who’d have to put up with the full-scale row there’d be if she wasn’t here? Me, that’s who. I’d never hear the end of it.’

‘Emma, would you listen to yourself? You’re an adult, this is your house and you can invite who you bloody want to. Let Dad throw a tantrum if he wants. Ignore him. I do.’ Kirsten ran a lilac fingernail down the list. ‘Monica and Timmy Maguire! Ugh, he’ll get poor Patrick in a corner and ask him what he should do with his shares, as usual. I told Patrick to ask for a fee next time.’

‘You’re bloody great at telling people what to do,’ hissed Emma, finally having had enough. She was hot, sweaty, tired and fed up with Kirsten. ‘Did you come here to help or to simply point out what an inadequate human being I am?’

Kirsten refused to be riled. ‘Keep your hair on, Sis,’ she answered. ‘You’re only pissed off because you know I’m right. If you don’t stand up to Dad some day, you may as well move back home – because you’re totally under his thumb as it is.’

Emma felt her anger deflate like a pricked balloon. Her eyes filled with tears. The goose wasn’t half-cooked, the guests were rolling up in an hour and Pete, who’d promised to be home early, was stuck with a client in Maynooth and wouldn’t be back until at least seven.

‘It’s easy for you,’ she told Kirsten, feeling hot, angry tears flooding down her face. ‘You’ve always been their pet. You could tell Dad to fuck off and he’d smile indulgently at you. But he hates me; I can never do anything right for him. All I want is some respect – it’s not too much to ask, is it?’ She tried to rub away the tears but they kept coming.

If fury had no effect on Kirsten, neither did weeping, which was why she so successfully dealt with her father’s machinations.

‘He doesn’t hate you, Sis,’ she said calmly, ignoring Emma’s tears. ‘He’s a bully and you’ve let yourself be his own personal punchbag. I can’t help you and neither can Pete. You’re on your own. Jesus, Emma, if you can run that bloody office, then you can certainly deal with Dad, can’t you? Now, what do you want me to do next? You better go upstairs and make yourself presentable or Petra the Gorgon will have a few choice insults to fling at you about how you’re letting yourself go now that you’re married.’

If the birthday dinner proved anything, it proved that their fears about their mother were unfounded. Anne-Marie sailed into the house with her husband in tow, face wreathed in smiles and new earrings to be admired. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she said coquettishly, pulling back a strand of long, pale gold hair, which flowed loosely around her shoulders. ‘They’re from your father.’ She kissed Kirsten happily.

‘Darling Kirsten, I don’t know what was wrong with me the other day, I found that lovely voucher you gave me for Christmas. I know it’s bad of me, but I completely forgot about it and now it’s out of date, but it was a lovely thought. I couldn’t see anything with those old glasses, but look –’ she produced new glasses with snazzy gold frames – ‘I’ve got new ones and reading is no problem any more. Hello, Emma love, there’s a nice smell coming from the kitchen. I hope it’s not goose; you know Auntie Petra says it gives her indigestion ever since we had it at her Roland’s christening back in 1957.’

Emma and Kirsten shared a conspiratorial grin. ‘All the more reason for cooking goose, eh?’ whispered Kirsten.

Emma nodded with relief. Her mother was perfectly all right. It was obvious there was nothing wrong with her mind. Nobody who could remember the ill-effects of a goose at a christening in 1957 could possibly have anything wrong with their brain.

Half an hour later, all the guests were there, wandering around the house and chatting. Emma was standing in the kitchen beside the dining-room door, hurriedly ironing the napkins she’d just removed from the drier. Her mother would have had a fit if she’d produced paper ones.

‘It’s a lovely dining room,’ she heard Monica Maguire say. ‘I like these pictures,’ she added, obviously admiring the Paul Klee prints Emma loved.

‘Well, it’s not to my taste,’ Emma overheard her father say gruffly. ‘Still, what can you say. I mean, myself and Anne-Marie gave them the deposit money for it and we’d have liked to have helped them with decorating advice, but you know youngsters, ungrateful.’

Emma stood behind the door into the dining room and felt cold rage flood through her. How dare he tell people he’d given them the deposit money for the house! How dare he! That was their private life. And he hadn’t given it to them, anyway. She and Pete had insisted on treating it as a loan and were paying money into her parents’ account every month. But to casually tell a neighbour about it, as if she and Pete were kids or freeloaders who used and abused…That was terrible, awful. A fierce rage for her father burned in her peaceful soul. God she hated that man!

CHAPTER NINE

Leonie was not thrilled with herself. Despite spending many arm-aching hours painting, the kitchen did not look the way she wanted it to. The plan had been simple: inspired by endless television make-overs, Leonie had convinced herself that she too could turn a small cottage kitchen into an exotic Egyptian-inspired room with the aid of midnight blue paint, some artistic stencilling and a can of metallic spray paint. Unfortunately, what looked easy in half an hour on the telly with scores of helpers, expert carpenters, an interior designer and an entire TV crew ready to help out if necessary, wasn’t easy in real life. After three evenings and her entire Sunday spent knee-deep in old newspapers with the animals sulking in another room, the kitchen looked desperate. Two of the walls were a frighteningly dark midnight blue with silver stars supposedly reflecting the silver of the knobs she’d bought for the cupboards. The cupboards themselves had been painted primrose to go with both the freshly painted woodwork and the other two walls, but instead of gliding on to the carefully prepared surfaces, the paint had dried in myriad globules so it looked as if the doors had developed smallpox.

Her idea of having stars on the ceiling had been lovely and very celestial, but midnight blue everywhere had made the room – small and, luckily, south-facing – a bit gloomy. So she’d wearily repainted two walls. It took three coats of primrose to cover the blue.

Meanwhile, the stencilled border, which the stencil book she’d borrowed from the library described as ‘an Egyptian-inspired motif of birds and animals’, resembled something inexpert four-year-olds might daub on their first day at school in between peeing in their seats and sobbing for their mummies.

‘It’s a bit ambitious, Leonie,’ her mother had remarked kindly when she arrived that afternoon with some flowers from her garden and home-made tea brack to celebrate the children’s return.

‘I like it better today,’ Claire said, finding a vase for the off-white roses and putting the kettle on to boil at the same time. ‘It was too dark when it was all blue.’

‘I know.’ Covered with paint and exhausted after forty-eight hours of decorating, Leonie was shattered. Her black leggings were like a Rorschach blot of primrose and blue paint, and Danny’s old grey sweatshirt wasn’t much better. Every inch of her hands was crusty with emulsion and she needed an hour in the bath at least.

‘What have you been up to all day, Mum?’ Leonie asked, reaching under the table to pet Penny’s silky ears. Penny, who’d been largely ignored during the painting, hummed in bliss.

‘I worked on Mrs Byrne’s daughter’s wedding dress for hours. The pair of them should be strung up. Every time I do something, she changes her mind and I have to rip it. Mrs Byrne insists on hanging around while I sew and the cats keep winding themselves round her legs so she’s permanently covered with fluff. I’m going to run out of Sello-tape getting cat fur off her dress.’ Leonie’s mother had been a seamstress and, on retirement, had started her own dressmaking business. She was very good, and her tiny Bray front room was permanently full of hopeful clients wanting a debs dress or wedding outfit knocked up for half-nothing.

Claire took out her cigarettes and lit up. ‘I stopped at five and came down here for a break. Will I make us some tea, or are you rushing?’

‘You stopped at five o’clock?’ Leonie shot up in her seat as the words sank in. ‘What time is it now? I’ve taken my watch off so it wouldn’t get covered with gloss and I thought it was only three at the latest.’

‘It’s half five.’

‘Oh, Mother of God, the kids are coming home in an hour,’ wailed Leonie. ‘I’ll never change and make it to the airport on time.’

‘Well, I did think you were being very relaxed about getting to the airport. Sure, what do you want to change for? Just go like that,’ said her mother sensibly.

‘I wanted to look lovely for them coming home,’ Leonie said, rooting around under newspapers for her keys. ‘I wanted the house to look lovely too…’

‘They’ll be so pleased to see you, they won’t mind a bit of paint. I’ll rustle up some supper for you all, shall I?’

Tired from the transatlantic flight, the trio emerged half an hour late behind a trolley jammed with plastic bags, rucksacks and bulging suitcases. Mel and Abby were fashionably pale, thanks to many teen magazine articles warning of skin cancer. Danny, on the other hand, was mahogany. All three wore new clothes which made Leonie instantly guilty: their father had obviously decided they were dressed like ragamuffins and had kitted them out from head to toe in new gear. She was a bad, spendthrift mother for frittering away money on a holiday when the kids needed new stuff. The knowledge that at least three-quarters of her clothes came from second-hand shops remained firmly at the back of her mind.

Mothers were supposed to dress in desperate, cast-off rags as long as their offspring had the newest designer clothes and whatever variety of trainers Nike were advertising twenty-four hours a day on MTV.

‘You’ll never guess,’ squealed Mel excitedly as soon as the new clothes had been admired and they were in the car, rattling along the motorway.

‘Yeah, Mel’s got herself a boyfriend,’ interrupted Danny.

‘Have not!’ shrieked Mel.

‘Yes you have,’ Danny said, sounding less like a nineteen-year-old and more like his fourteen-year-old twin sisters. Well, more like Mel. Not Abby. Abby was so grown up she wasn’t fourteen – she was going on forty.

‘Haven’t! And that wasn’t what I was going to say!’ roared Mel.

‘Stop it,’ said Leonie, wishing they’d waited at least until they were a mile away from the airport before the inevitable row. Danny and Mel sparked off each other like pieces of flint. Every conversation between them turned into an argument. It was because they were so alike. Abby was thoughtful and grave, like her father. Her siblings were the complete opposite.

Mel’s favourite sentence when she’d been four was, ‘I want Danny’s…’ Danny’s dinner, Danny’s drink, Danny’s toys. If it was his, she wanted it. And he, at the wise old age of nine, had been just as bad. Mel’s favourite cuddly toy – without which she refused to go to sleep – had been hidden with Danny’s Action Man collection for three whole murderous, sleepless nights before Leonie found it when she was hoovering.

The current argument subsided purely because Danny decided to play with his new Discman and stuck his earphones in with a bored shrug that said, ‘Women, huh!’ Leonie shuddered to imagine what a Discman cost. Hundreds of dollars, no doubt. Ray must be making a mint.

‘Will I tell her?’ Abby whispered to Mel.

‘Yes.’ Mel was sulking now. She stared out of the window with her pointed little face in a sulky pout. The beauty of the family, Mel could even sulk prettily. With her father’s big dark eyes, delicately arched eyebrows, translucent skin and full lips, she looked like a teenage catwalk model trying to look moody for a photo shoot.

‘Tell me what?’ asked Leonie, fascinated and dying to hear every bit of their news.

‘It’s Dad…’ Abby began slowly.

Mel couldn’t bear it. She had to interrupt: ‘He’s getting married,’ she cried. ‘To Fliss! She’s gorgeous, she can ski, and we’re all invited to Colorado with them – and for the wedding too. She’s going to get us dresses made. I want a short one with high boots –’

She shut up at a quick poke in the ribs from her twin.

‘I know it sounds a bit sudden, Mum,’ said Abby delicately, wise beyond her years and knowing the news might be hard for her mother to take.

Sudden, thought Leonie, struggling to keep her eyes focused on the road. Sudden wasn’t the word. Ray was getting married again. She could barely take it in. She was here with nobody and no romantic prospects while he, the one she thought would flounder because he was so quiet, so introspective, so broken-hearted when they’d split up ten years previously, was in love and getting married.

A lump swelled in her throat and she was glad that it was Danny in the front of the car with her, unobservant Danny who was locked into his Discman and some thumping ambient beat. Watchful Abby would have noticed her mother’s eyes filling with tears right away.

‘Well,’ she managed to say, the words nearly sticking in her throat, ‘that’s great. When is the big day?’

‘January,’ said Mel wistfully, already imagining herself in groin-level flimsy silk, her long legs in knee-high boots giving middle-aged men heart attacks. ‘Fliss’s family have a cabin in Colorado and they’re going to have a winter wedding in the snow. Imagine! Us skiing. That’ll teach snotty Dervla Malone to boast about her holidays. Stupid cow thinks going to France is posh! Huh. She can kiss my ass.’

‘Melanie!’ Leonie narrowly avoided a daredevil bus driver and shot her daughter a fierce glare in the rear-view mirror. ‘If that’s the sort of language you’ve picked up on your holidays, you won’t be going anywhere. We don’t swear in our house.’

Mel flicked back her straight dark brown hair insouciantly, crinkling up her perfect little nose as she did so. ‘Lighten up,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘I heard that,’ Leonie replied tightly.

‘Aw, Mom,’ pleaded Mel, deciding to be conciliatory in case she wasn’t allowed to go to the wedding. ‘Sorry. But that’s not bad language. In Boston, people say that all the time. I mean, everyone in Ireland says “fuck” every five minutes. All Dad’s friends say so. They think we say “super-fucking-market”.’

‘Mel!’ hissed Abby.

‘We do not say that word all the time, and I don’t want to hear you say it either, got it?’ Leonie snapped, wondering why the Von Trapp family reunion wasn’t working out the way she had planned. So much for giant hugs and tearful murmurings of: ‘Mum, we missed you so much, we’ll never go away again.’

One child had become an American overnight and couldn’t wait to get back there to see her father’s fiancée, another was immersed in music and had refused to be hugged. Only dear sweet Abby seemed vaguely pleased to be home.

‘Tell me about this gorgeous fella you’re not going out with,’ Leonie requested in an attempt to get the conversation back on an even keel.

Both girls giggled. ‘Brad is his name,’ explained Abby eagerly. ‘He’s sixteen, tall, with naturally blond hair and he drives a jeep. He was nuts about Mel. He brought us both for a pizza.’

‘Brad, mm,’ said Leonie with a fake smile, her mind doing cartwheels. A sixteen-year-old with his own transport going out with her little girl! Melanie was only fourteen – a very knowing fourteen it had to be said, but still fourteen for all that. What the hell was Ray thinking of! She could have been assaulted, raped, anything!

‘His parents are Dad’s friends, and we weren’t out long,’ Abby added. ‘Dad said he’d murder Brad if we were gone more than an hour and a half, and the pizza place is just down the street.’

‘I wasn’t that interested,’ Mel said airily. ‘He’s too immature for me.’

‘He wasn’t,’ protested Abby and, with a catch in her voice, added, ‘he was lovely.’

I wished he’d fancied me instead of Mel, were the unspoken words.

Leonie’s heart ached for her much-loved daughter, the one who looked just like her. Abby had none of her twin’s effortless prettiness. Abby was as tall as Mel but stocky, with a solid body, mousy brown hair like Leonie’s before she got at it with the bleach, and a round, pleasant face that was only enlivened by her mother’s startling blue eyes. She was a steady, reliable estate car to Melanie’s sleek, capricious Ferrari, and she knew it.

Leonie adored her and saw such beauty and strength of character in Abby’s kind, loving face. But fourteen-year-old girls didn’t want strength of character: they wanted to look like drop-dead gorgeous movie stars and have teenage boys falling at their feet like flies. Mel did, Abby didn’t. And there was nothing their mother could do to even matters up.

At home, the girls rushed out of the car, eager to see their beloved Penny, Clover the cat and Herman.

‘Penny,’ they squealed in unison as their grandmother opened the front door and Penny sprang out like a caged tiger, hysterical with delight. A huge group hug ensued, with everyone trying to cuddle Penny and have it proved that they were her favourite and had been missed the most. With typical feline indifference, Clover refused to have any truck with cuddles, flicked her tail sharply in disapproval and shot off into the garden.

‘She’s affected by the paint fumes,’ muttered Leonie’s mother wickedly.

Luggage was dropped carelessly in the hall, waiting for Leonie to haul it to the various bedrooms.

‘Mom!’ said Mel, aghast, on entering the kitchen which had been magnolia the last time she’d seen it. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘Having an orgy with Francis Bacon,’ laughed Danny, coming up behind his sister and staring at the brightly coloured disaster area which his grandmother had failed to tidy up completely. ‘Were you helping, Gran?’

‘No, and don’t tease your poor mother. She’s been trying to brighten this place up,’ she said sternly, heading to the cooker where a chicken stew was bubbling appetizingly. ‘Your mother needs a hand to tidy up.’

‘I’ve got people to phone,’ said Mel, backing out of the room rapidly at the notion of ruining her nails cleaning up all that horrible newsprint and emulsion. Fliss had given her a French manicure before they’d left for Logan Airport. Domestic work would ruin the effect and she wanted her hands perfect for the next day when she’d pay a visit to her arch enemy and supposed friend, Dervla Malone.

‘Me too.’ Danny was gone like a shot, leaving Abby, her mother, grandmother and a still joyous Penny amid the endless paint-splattered newspapers and cans of paint.

‘I’ll help, Mum,’ said Abby loyally.

‘No, love, we’ll eat in the living room,’ Leonie decided, looking dismally at the chaos and deciding that she couldn’t face a proper clean up. She’d bag all the newspaper and that would be it for the moment. ‘Thanks for cooking,’ she added, giving her mother a peck on the cheek.

They ate on their knees in the living room with the TV on while Danny controlled the remote and flicked from channel to channel in between wolfing down chicken and rice.

Green, thought Leonie, looking around the small but cosy room with its apple-green walls and profusion of plants. Green was the colour she should have painted the kitchen. Not horrible midnight blue. If they could cope with blue for a week, she’d re-do it all next weekend. Maybe a paler green…

Mel’s words intruded into her brain, dragging her away from paint.

‘…Fliss is really nice,’ Mel was whispering to her grandmother, who was nodding wisely and trying not to look at her daughter.

Leonie felt her face burn, knowing her mother pitied her and hating it. Claire had loved Ray and had been heartbroken when they’d got a divorce. ‘There aren’t as many fish in the sea when you’re actively looking, Leonie,’ she had said gently at the time. ‘You love each other: can’t you get on with it and stop looking for true love? I’m so afraid you’ll regret this.’

Ten years on, she’d been proved right, Leonie thought bitterly. Ray had had several long-term girlfriends while she, the great believer in true love, had had so few dates that flirting with the postman was her idea of romantic excitement. And he was past sixty and grizzled looking.

She pretended to concentrate on the sitcom Danny was watching and surreptitiously listened to Mel telling her grandmother all about the holiday.

‘Dad’s house is lovely but not big enough for us, Gran, although it had en suites everywhere,’ said the girl who’d been raised in a succession of small homes and now lived in a cottage with one bathroom and a constant queue for it.

‘Fliss wants to convert one bedroom into a dressing room for herself. She has so many clothes!’

Yeah, snarled Leonie to herself. Probably all band-aid skirts and second-skin leather things. She imagined a cheerleader type, shimmering blonde hair and teeth that had never eaten too many sugar-laden Curly Wurlys as a child. Or maybe she was a hard-bitten businesswoman, another lawyer, all power suits like someone from LA Law. Suddenly Leonie stopped, horrified at herself. What was wrong with her, she wondered blindly. She’d wanted to leave Ray, she’d started the whole agonizing process of separation and divorce – so why was she now jealous of this gorgeous Fliss? He was entitled to another life; she’d practically pushed him into it, hadn’t she?

What sort of person was she turning into if she begrudged Ray a little happiness? A bitch, that’s what. A cast-iron bitch.

Abby was eating very little of her dinner. She normally wolfed it down, eating far more quickly than her twin who nibbled daintily. Now, Abby pushed bits of chicken listlessly around her plate. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Leonie asked in concern, staring across the coffee table to where Abby sat beside her grandmother on the sofa-bed.

Abby smiled brightly. ‘Fine, Mum, fine,’ she replied. ‘I’m just not hungry.’

‘That’d be a first,’ guffawed Danny.

Abby’s eyes glistened but she said nothing.

Leonie gave her an encouraging grin and vowed to kill Danny when she got him alone. He wouldn’t know how to spell ‘thoughtfulness’, never mind know what it meant. Abby silently took the plates out to the kitchen while Mel rummaged around in a very trendy vinyl handbag Leonie had never seen before. More holiday goodies from a doting father.

‘The holiday snaps,’ Mel announced happily, finding a huge wad of photo envelopes. ‘I can’t wait any longer to show them to you, Mum.’

Leonie cranked her jaw into a steely smile and hoped she could fake a bit of pleasure at the sight of the beautiful Fliss.

Leonie, Claire and Mel squashed up together on the two-seater to view the precious pictures. The first batch of photos were typically Mel – ones where people had their heads chopped off or shots of the glamorous shops in Boston where the reflection from the glass meant you couldn’t see anything.

‘I don’t know how they didn’t work out so well,’ Mel said in consternation as they all tried to figure out who was who in one particularly blurry picture.

The next batch was better.

‘I took them,’ Danny said loftily from his position as king of the remote control.

After a couple of photos of the girls and Ray, who looked healthy and tanned, there was Fliss.

‘That was the day we took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard,’ Mel said wistfully as she passed the photo along to her mother.

Leonie stared in shock. Instead of the young, gorgeous girl she’d imagined, Fliss was at least her own age. But there the similarity ended. As tall as Ray, she was slim with dark, boyishly cut hair and the sort of beautiful unlined face that made Leonie wonder when Revlon would be signing her up for a moisturizer advertisement for stunning women over forty. She wore faded jeans on endless legs and a navy polo shirt tucked in at the waistband. In every picture, she was smiling, whether she was hugging Ray or laughing with Mel and the notoriously camera-shy Abby. Even Danny had been coerced into the photos and had posed, long hair windswept, on the ferry beside Fliss.

‘She’s lovely and she’s very clever, you know. She’s a lawyer in Daddy’s firm,’ Mel prattled on, unaware that Leonie was passing the photos along to Claire with the frozen movements of a robot. ‘She has the most wonderful clothes. Daddy teases her for being voted Best Dressed Lawyer in the firm two years in a row!’

Leonie knew she’d never be voted best dressed anything, not unless outsized silk shirts and all-encompassing voluminous skirts suddenly became haute couture.

‘The most incredible thing is she practically never wears make-up,’ Mel added in awe, knocking the final nail into her mother’s coffin. ‘Mascara and a little gloss, that’s all. Although she gets her nails done. Everyone does in America.’

Leonie thought of her own pancake-plastered face and the long minutes she spent applying her goodies every morning. She wouldn’t leave the house without lipliner, kohl and blusher, never mind just a bit of gloss and mascara.

The pride in her daughter’s voice when she talked about this elegant, glamorous stepmother-to-be made her wonder what Mel really thought of her. Had Mel longed to have a mother just like Fliss, instead of a faux-jolly one who flirted outrageously and laughed loudly at even the most unfunny jokes in order to cover up her insecurities? Painfully, she saw herself through Melanie’s eyes: a big fat woman who tried to hide her bulk with ludicrous flowing clothes and tried to make herself interesting with make-up.

‘Time for Coronation Street,’ announced Claire loudly. ‘You’ll have to show me the rest of your pictures tomorrow, Mel – I can’t miss Coro. Now, get out to the kitchen and make us a pot of tea. I’m an old woman and I need sustenance. Biscuits would be nice too.’

Mel responded to her grandmother’s voice with total obedience. It was Claire’s manner that did it, Leonie thought, grateful for the interruption. If Leonie had asked for tea, Mel would have moaned, ‘Let Abby do it. She’s out there.’

As it was, she collected up her photos and went out to make tea, humming happily to herself.

‘Change the channel, Daniel,’ ordered Claire imperiously.

He did and the strains of the soap’s theme tune filled the room. Claire patted her daughter’s knee in a gesture of solidarity. Leonie knew her mother would never speak about Ray’s new love unless asked for her opinion, but she would be aware just how raw Leonie felt, simply because she knew her so well.

They sat through two hours of television before Claire took her leave. ‘I’ve got four bridesmaids’ dresses to make this week, so I need an early start,’ she said as she collected her keys from the pottery bowl in the hall. The girls appeared from their room to kiss their grandmother goodbye; Danny roared ‘bye’ from the kitchen where he was making a crisp-and-cheese sandwich for himself.

Claire hugged her daughter last of all: a tight, comforting hug. ‘Phone me tomorrow if you need to chat,’ was all she said, a coded message that meant: If you want to sob down the phone about Ray and Fliss.

After she was gone, Leonie pottered about, tidying up the sitting room and starting on the disaster area that was the kitchen. Mel had left the photos on the coffee table in the sitting room and they drew Leonie like a magnet. She wanted to look at them again, to see how beautiful Fliss was, how slim, how perfect.

Like a dieter drawn inexorably to the last KitKat nestling at the back of the cupboard, she couldn’t resist looking. Danny was engrossed in some cop show and wouldn’t notice, she hoped. Quietly, she snatched the photos and brought them into her bedroom. Penny followed her loyally and lay down on the bed with her as she flicked through the envelopes feeling guilty.

Afraid Mel would somehow know which order the photos were in, Leonie carefully went through them so as not to mix them up. There were loads more of Fliss, more than Mel had shown them.

In one, they were obviously all at dinner in some swanky restaurant. Mel was sitting beside Fliss wearing what looked like a very adult sparkly top that Leonie didn’t recognize. Abby looked her normal self in a white shirt, but Ray was utterly transformed. He looked as sparkling as Mel’s top. The next photo was a close-up of Ray and Fliss, and his face was animated in a way Leonie never remembered it being. He looked utterly content. He’d never looked that way with her, Leonie reflected sadly.

She flicked through the rest of the pictures, feeling more dispirited than ever. After a while, she put them back in the envelopes and stuck them in the kitchen in the old wicker basket on the table where she kept the bills and letters. That way, if Mel had been looking for them, Leonie could say she’d put them in the basket for safekeeping.

In the girls’ room, Abby was in bed reading Pride and Prejudice, her favourite book, while Mel was at the dressing table painstakingly cleansing her face with cold cream.

This was a new routine, Leonie realized. Normally, Mel didn’t bother with any cleansing ritual; she blithely imagined that acne was for other, less naturally pretty girls and never so much as wiped off the mascara she wasn’t supposed to wear. Now, she was industriously patting her face with cotton wool pads as if she was a restorer working on a muddy Monet.

Leonie sat down on the edge of Mel’s bed. ‘It’s lovely to have you back,’ she said, wishing she didn’t feel like an intruder in their bedroom after a mere three weeks’ absence.

‘Yeah,’ muttered Mel. ‘Wish we weren’t going back to school though. I hate school. I wish it was January.’

Unusually, Abby wasn’t in a mood to talk. She often followed her mother into bed, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, stroking Penny’s velvety ears and talking nineteen to the dozen until they realized it was half eleven and gasped at the thought that they had to get up at seven. Tonight, she smiled a suspiciously thin smile at Leonie and went back to her book, obviously not wanting to be drawn into any conversation. Maybe she, too, was missing the perfect Fliss, Leonie thought sadly.

Feeling in the way and miserable, she retreated. She turned off the hall light, locked the back door after Penny had been outside for her ablutions, and warned Danny not to have the TV on too loudly. Then she went to bed.

She rarely switched on her clock radio at night but tonight she felt lonely, so she flicked the switch. A late-night discussion show was on and the subject matter was dating agencies.

‘Where would ya find a fella in the back of beyond without some help?’ demanded one woman, fighting back against a male caller who felt that paying for introductions was the last resort of the hopeless.

‘I bet you look like a complete old cow,’ the male caller interrupted smugly, pointing out that he was married with four kids.

‘And I bet your wife is screwing around on ya, ya old curmudgeon,’ retorted the woman.

The radio host intervened, sensing the argument was going to hit the four-letter-word level. ‘We’ll be back after the news,’ he said smoothly, ‘for an interview with a couple who found true love in the personal ads.’

Leonie was hooked. An hour later, she turned the radio and her light off and lay in bed in darkness. She wasn’t alone after all. There were lots of people who felt lonely and didn’t know where to go to meet new partners, people who felt too old for the twenty-something pub scene and too young for tea dances. The woman on the radio had been like Leonie: a lonely woman who couldn’t imagine falling in love ever again. Two adverts in her local Belfast paper later, she was dating a lovely man. Now they were getting married and were going to be the subject of a documentary about finding love in unusual ways. Why shouldn’t I try that too, Leonie asked herself. If she had a man, she wouldn’t feel depressed about Ray and Fliss, or about how Mel seemed bored to be home, or about how fat she was getting, or anything.

She curled her toes up under the duvet at the thought of her exciting plan: she’d take out a personal ad or join a dating agency. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, was to find a man. That was it, she had to have one. And then she’d feel better about herself. Wouldn’t she?

‘What does GSOH mean?’ Leonie asked, staring at her horoscope in the tiny kitchen during the ten minutes they tried to snatch each day between morning rounds and the beginning of surgery.

Angie, the practice’s only female vet, looked up from the crossword she did effortlessly each morning in seven minutes flat. ‘Good sense of humour,’ she replied in her crisp Australian accent. Clear grey eyes scrutinized her colleague. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing.’

A moment passed.

‘You thinking of personal ads?’ Angie asked.

Leonie flushed and grinned. It was always a mistake to bullshit Angie, who was one of the smartest women she knew. ‘Yes. Desperate, isn’t it? I’m never going to meet a man round here, am I?’

‘Not unless you want to run off with the postman – who does fancy you, in my opinion. He takes a long time delivering the mail when you answer the door.’

‘You’re a cow, Angie. He’s practically at retiring age. And if he’s the best I can do, I may as well give up. It drives me mad, you know. People think if you work in a vet practice the place is a throbbing hotbed of lust with hormones all over the place because we deal with animals. I don’t see why,’ Leonie said plaintively. ‘What’s so sexy about staring at Tim’s face while he operates on some cat’s anal glands?’

‘It’s the old doctors and nurses thing,’ Angie remarked sagely. ‘Romantic novels are full of doctors and nurses having it off in between quadruple bypasses. It’s fictional fantasy, but everyone thinks it must be the same here. It’s the white coat that does it. Women want to be bonked senseless by a guy in a white coat because he’s in charge and they can indulge their “I couldn’t help it, m’lud, he made me do it” fantasy.’

‘Fantasy’s all very well, but the reality is very different,’ Leonie said, giving up on her horoscope because Virgos were going to have a bad day and fight with everyone. ‘Tim’s happily married, Raoul is engaged and, unless we both turn gay, you’re out of bounds. Maybe if Raoul went back to South America, we could hire a new hunky young vet and our eyes would lock over the operating table when we were neutering a ginger tom.’ She sighed at the thought. ‘Then again, he’d want to be deranged to fall for a divorced mother of three, wouldn’t he? An insolvent mother of three, at that. I’m broke again, Angie, my overdraft is in the stratosphere and Mel is whingeing on about new clothes…’

‘Personal ads are a great idea,’ Angie interrupted before Leonie got carried away on misery. ‘Loads of people use them these days and you’re not going to meet the man of your dreams in this town, now, are you? What would you say in your ad?’

Leonie extracted a piece of folded-up newsprint from her pocket. ‘I got this from the Guardian in the surgery waiting room. It’s got pages of ads. “Soulmates” they call them. I just don’t understand what they all mean. I read it for ages earlier and it’s like reading Mongolian. Listen to this: “Zany Slim Blonde F, GSOH, n/s WLTM creative M, preferably TDH for loving r/ship. Ldn.”’

Angie translated: ‘Zany blonde female with a good sense of humour, non-smoker, would like to meet a creative male, preferably tall, dark and handsome for a loving relationship. Based in London.’

‘Ah, gotcha.’ Leonie scanned the rest of the ads. ‘The only problem is that all these women are slim and all the men want slim women. See: “seeks slim, attractive woman…” She could be an axe-murderer, but as long as she’s slim, it’s OK.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Angie, who was tall, attractive in a sporty way and very, very slim.

‘It’s true. Look at them.’

Together, they scanned the list. The men, who described themselves as anything from ‘cuddly’ (‘That means fat,’ Angie pointed out), to ‘Not easy to describe in four to five lines’ (‘Short, fat and often mistaken for a pot-bellied pig,’ said Angie).

They giggled over some of the descriptions: the surgical walker who wanted a fun and adventurous companion; and Sir Lancelot who was seeking his Guinevere.

‘Would a wimple and chastity belt be necessary?’ Angie mused.

‘Listen to this: “Shy male, 35, virgin, seeks similar for relationship.” How could you be a virgin at thirty-five? That is weird.’

‘Not if he’s religious,’ Angie countered.

‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. What does “seeks for possible relationship” mean?’ Leonie asked, bemused.

‘That he wants to shag you senseless after a meal where you went Dutch and then he never wants to see you again,’ Angie said knowledgeably. ‘Happened to a friend of mine in Sydney. She’s a veteran of the personals, but even she got badly burned once. He said he was a gorgeous doctor and he wasn’t lying, so she forgot her plan to play hard to get and they did it on the first date. Champagne, chocolate body-paint, Polaroid camera, the lot. She never set eyes on him again. Bastard.’

Leonie shuddered at the thought of someone with Polaroid photos of her naked self. She read some more: ‘ “Seeks classy blonde for fun and games.” This is mad stuff. Why doesn’t he just hire a hooker?’

‘These are hip and trendy ads. You want a nice country ad in a country paper.’

‘You sure?’

‘Positive. Someone with a cosy hearth who has several animals, pots of money and who looks good in wellington boots.’

‘Wicklow is full of blokes like that,’ Leonie dead-panned. ‘The surgery is probably jammed with a consignment as we speak, all bearing red roses at the news that I’m looking for lurve. Oh yes, and a sick sheep they need looked at. Come on, we’d better get to work.’

They discussed the personal ads some more that morning as Angie whizzed through spaying four cats, two dogs and descaling the teeth on a very old beagle.

Leonie assisted her, shaving the animals’ bellies and disinfecting them before Angie got to work. It was also her job to monitor breathing and colour. Older animals were often put on oxygen during operations. Younger ones tended to do well without it, but Leonie kept an eye on their colour to make sure they were getting enough oxygen. At the first sign of a tongue going grey, she’d give them pure oxygen.

‘Be honest in your advert,’ Angie advised, delicately sewing up a tabby kitten’s soft beige belly. ‘Say “voluptuous”, because you are and you want to make sure whoever wants to meet you knows that. You don’t want to end up with some bloke whose aim in life is to make you lose a stone.’

‘It’s nice to have at least one friend who’s honest with me,’ Leonie said, keeping an eye on the kitten’s breathing. ‘If I asked anyone else, they’d lie through their teeth and tell me I’m slim, really. My mother is always telling me I’m beautiful the way I am and not to think about dieting, which is bullshit.’

‘Your mother is a wonderful woman and no, it’s not bullshit. Half the women in the country are trying to kill themselves dieting. It’s a waste of time – you know it. Most people who lose weight put it right back on again eventually.’

‘Tell me about it!’ Leonie groaned, feeling the waistband of her blue uniform biting into her flesh. ‘If I was to put an advert in the paper, what would I say?’

‘Voluptuous, sensual…’ began Angie.

‘Get out of here!’ shrieked Leonie, secretly pleased. ‘Sensual! You can’t say that.’

‘Why not?’ Angie finished the kitten. She gave her a shot of antibiotics and brought her back to her cage.

She returned with a Yorkshire terrier for spaying and took up the conversation as if she’d never been away. ‘You are, in every sense of the word. Sensual isn’t just to do with sex, you know. It also means someone who enjoys using their senses, and you do.’

‘Yeah but saying “sensual” in an advert in the Wicklow Times will result in a rush of callers thinking I’m looking for an entirely different sort of man friend, the sort who leaves the money on the mantelpiece.’

‘OK then, how about “Blue-eyed blonde, voluptuous, er…”’

‘…loves children.’

‘That might put him off,’ Angie pointed out, ‘ ’cos he’ll think you’re on the hunt for a sperm donor rather than a man.’

‘Well, I’ve got to mention the children.’

‘“Loves children and animals”?’ Angie suggested.

‘That’s it.’

Angie really began to get into the swing of things. She wanted to keep discussing adverts. But Leonie didn’t want everyone in the practice to know about her personal life. Louise, one of the other nurses, kept going into the operating room to talk to Angie and Leonie didn’t want her to hear.

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ she hissed to Angie.

Operations over, Leonie went back to cleaning out the animals’ cages. As a nurse, she worked mainly at the back of the practice where two walls were lined with animal cages for their patients. At any one time, there could be forty animals looking mournfully out at the nurses and vets as they waited for operations or recovered from them. Today, there were several animals scheduled for spaying in the afternoon and three in for blood tests to try and figure out what was wrong with them.

Bubble, a pretty white cat with ragged ears, was vomiting constantly and needed a whole range of tests including liver and kidney function. Bubble had already been through the wars vet-wise. White cats were prone to skin cancers on the tips of their ears and Bubble had already had three operations. A seasoned surgery cat, she was very clever at escaping when her cage was opened, so Leonie had put an ESCAPE ARTIST sign over her cage. ‘Escape artist’ was better than ‘wild’, which was the sign they put over feral cats people occasionally brought in. These practically wild cats often tested positive for the feline version of HIV, and more often than not were put to sleep. Leonie had received many scars from being scratched by these poor, unloved creatures.

Below Bubble was Lester, a yellow ferret who was looking for a home. Lester was a bit of an escape artist himself and had managed to wriggle out of Louise’s arms earlier and had hidden in the medicine cupboard for ten minutes before he could be recaptured. Leonie carefully took Lester out and tidied his cage. Putting him back with a cuddly toy, she watched him play with it, biting its neck frenziedly. She’d thought of giving Lester a home herself because she could never bear to see animals unloved. Ferrets could bite but, so far, Lester hadn’t hurt anyone. Watching him kill the teddy, she reconsidered.

How would Lester describe himself for a personal ad?

Sleek, friendly male with an interest in the life of Houdini seeks loving home with someone who doesn’t mind being nibbled. Prospective females must enjoy romping in the garden and appreciate strong, masculine scent.

Leonie grinned to herself. Put that way, Lester sounded irresistible. She must remember to read between the lines of the adverts. Otherwise, God alone knew what would happen.

CHAPTER TEN

The one drawback about being one of the three members of staff who could work the switchboard was that you inevitably had to take over when the receptionist wasn’t available. And Carolyn, the girl who’d been working as the Dwyer, Dwyer & James receptionist for the past two weeks, was never available. Hannah was already regretting hiring her. Carolyn had been off sick once the previous week and today, she’d rung in at ten to nine claiming to have the flu.

‘Gillian, can you do reception today?’ Hannah had asked Gillian, who was still deeply resentful of the fact that Hannah had been brought in as office manager. Gillian had loved knowing where all the agents were and phoning them to check if they were all right. It gave her power over them.

‘I can until lunch,’ Gillian had snapped. ‘I’m on a half-day today.’

Which meant that Hannah didn’t have a chance to get on with her own work and had to spend the afternoon at the front desk, fielding calls in between trying to track down a consignment of office supplies which had gone missing.

Naturally, as soon as anybody walked in, the phones went mad. The woman standing at the reception desk didn’t look impressed by the fact that Hannah had had to answer four calls before dealing with her. The woman was quivering with impatience, but Hannah waited until she could see the red light on her switchboard go off, indicating that Donna Nelson was off the phone.

‘Donna, call for you on line one: a Mr McElhinney about the property in York Road.’

‘Thanks, Hannah.’

Swivelling in her new, very comfortable chair, Hannah finally faced the anxious-looking young woman in front of her reception desk. It was a low desk: it had to be, Hannah had explained to David James when he’d discussed refitting the office with her. ‘People need to be able to see you, not feel they’re queueing up at the post office.’

‘I do apologize for all the interruptions,’ she said in a conciliatory tone, ‘it’s been terribly busy today. Now, how can I help you?’

‘Number 73 Shandown Terrace, is it gone yet?’ the woman said, voice rising with each word, pale freckled face distraught. ‘We only realized it was for sale this instant. We’ve always loved that road and we so wanted to live there. Don’t tell me it’s sold.’

‘Hold on one moment,’ Hannah said soothingly. She scanned through her computer files and found the house. Steve Shaw, the agency’s obnoxious young agent, was handling the sale. He’d brought two people to view it but nobody had put in an offer.

‘Needs twenty thou spent on it before rats would live in it!’ Steve had snorted when he came back from his first visit to the property.

‘I’ve good news,’ Hannah said, ‘it’s still on the market. Would you like to speak to the agent who’s handling it?’

A few minutes later, Steve was sitting on the reception area’s oatmeal couch with the woman – sitting far too close to her, in Hannah’s opinion. That was Steve’s technique for selling property – invading women’s personal space and flirting with them as if they were the most beautiful creatures he’d ever set eyes on.

He’d tried it on with Hannah the moment he’d met her. Just back from his honeymoon and with a mocha Bahamian tan, he thought he was gorgeous. He thought she was gorgeous too and kept calling her that.

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